The Tao of George

There’s a reason why “It’s A Wonderful Life” is such an enduring film—and it’s probably not what you think.

It’s not just that certain copyright and licensing issues led to it airing every night on every station every holiday season for many years, making it as much a part of Christmas as trimming the tree and exchanging gifts.

It’s not just that it’s sweet or sentimental or so called Capracorn.

It’s not just that it’s an exceptionally written, perfectly acted and directed, inspiring and entertaining movie.

It’s the Taoist-like balance it achieves, the yin-yang of its light and darkness, the truth of human existence it captures and conveys.

Birthed out of failure, “It’s a Wonderful Life” began as a short story titled, “The Greatest Gift,” written by Philip Van Doren Stern, who, after failing to find a publisher for it, made it into a Christmas card, which he mailed to two-hundred family members and friends. Originally purchased by RKO Pictures as a vehicle for Cary Grant, three different scripts were written and rejected before the project was shelved and Grant went on to make the “Bishop’s Wife”—all of which led to Frank Capra getting involved and the success the film ultimately became. Of course, success is relative. This seminal, among-the-best-of-all-times movie was a box office failure when first released in 1946.

George Bailey is a small-town man whose life seems so desperate he contemplates suicide. He had always wanted to leave Bedford Falls to see the world, but circumstances and his own good heart have led him to stay. He sacrificed his education for his brother's, kept the family-run savings and loan afloat, protected the town from the avarice of the greedy banker Mr. Potter, and married his childhood sweetheart. As he prepares to jump from a bridge, Clarence, his guardian angel, intercedes; showing him what life would have become for the residents of Bedford Falls if he had never lived—a hellish existence in the greed-driven, dark, depraved Pottersville.

Clarence tells George, “See, you’ve really had a wonderful life.”

But has he?

As “wonderful” as George’s life is—particularly in its positive impact on others, it’s not all wonderful—or even good. There’s a price to pay for living in a small town—or any size place where you don’t fit in. There’s a price to pay for honesty and integrity, for a life lived in service to others and high ideals, a high price for not having a price. The biggest price George pays is an internal one, intellectual and spiritual, the anguish and frustration that comes from being awake, surrounded by those who slumber.

Appropriately black and white, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is profoundly Taoist in its push-pull of yin and yang. These two forces, and the interplay between them, arise out of emptiness—symbolized by the empty circle they are drawn into. George embodies, and is surrounded by, and is acutely aware of, light and dark, soft and hard, masculine and feminine, receptive and aggressive, but mostly the empty that is around and in and between all things. And it’s this balance of the lighter and darker sides of existence that elevate this film to greatness. Without the one, you’d have silly, sweet, sentimental swill. Without the other, you’d have only meaninglessness and darkness. But the two together achieve a complexity and profundity that so mirrors reality it gives rise to the notion that life can actually imitate art.

Many viewers seem to miss how truly dark the film actually is, but it’s this ingredient, this rich yinish quality that enables “It’s a Wonderful Life” to earn its inspiration and ending.

The film’s shadow side doesn’t just appear when Bedford Falls transforms into Pottersville. It’s been there all along—showing through the skein between realities, in the injustice and inequity, in the claustrophobia and frustration, in the way the rich and powerful oppress the poor and disenfranchised.

Perhaps more than an alternate reality, Pottersville is the same reality as Bedford Falls—only seen differently. George Bailey, a truly good, kind, and decent person projects a goodness and decency on the world he inhabits. To him, the town is Bedford Falls. Old Man Potter has always seen it as Pottersville. The rich and powerful always view the world as theirs—their right, their entitlement, their prize, their reward. Instead of Pottersville being the version of reality that resulted from George never being born, maybe it’s what happens when a good man like George finally allows the selfishness and brutishness and meaner aspects of lesser men to cloud his vision, when he gives up and gives in, quits fighting the good fight and turns the whole thing over to them.

The Tao is the way or path (a term used in a lot of the world’s great wisdom traditions). It is ancient. Ineffable. Unnamable (“the Tao that can be named is not the Tao”). And you don’t have to be Taoist to appreciate its universals truths or the wisdom of its most sacred text, the Tao Te Ching.

This way or channel is the flow of the universe. True fulfillment and serenity comes from living in harmony with it, walking the path. Like us, George spends much of his life fighting the path, stubbornly resisting the way, insisting he has a better way. Invariably, when he surrenders and begins to travel the way he glimpses his best self and begins to practice wei wu wei—doing without doing, actionless action, that in-the-zone, alignment with the Tao, where we, like water, flow in a stream of effortless action/in-action, yielding, becoming inseparable, indistinguishable from the creator and all of creation. Truly one.

But George went to some very dark places before aligning himself with the Tao, before giving in and becoming truly free.

Like religion and philosophy, we turn to art for meaning—and few films are as meaningful and as much about meaning as “It’s a Wonderful Life.” That an average George can make a difference, can have meaning by giving meaning to others gives us hope, challenges us to make a difference. Viewing the film is a religious experience for me. Profound. Transcendent. Trasformational. Watching it each year is a rite, a ritual, a memorial and remembrance.

For me, “It’s a Wonderful Life” is both inspirational and cathartic. It moves me like no other movie. I laugh and cry (a lot). I am George Bailey. I am small town. I have a small life. My Bedford Falls existence could easily be Pottersville if not for love, for art, for meaning, for family and friends. I’m on a quest, searching for meaning, attempting to walk the way. I want to make a difference in the world and doubt that I am doing much of anything that matters to much of anybody. George inspires me to give, to take the small gifts I’ve been given, like a few measly loaves and fish, and share them with others. It’s what Philip Van Doren Stern did with his story, “The Greatest Gift.” It’s what I’m attempting to do at this very moment by writing and giving away this column, for I believe what is written beneath the picture of George’s dad in his office: “All you can take with you is that which you’ve given away.”

The Most Wonderful Films of the Year

What is it about Christmas movies?

I don’t mean Oscar contenders released during the holidays, but films in which Christmas is actually a character.

Why are the good ones SOOOO good?

What makes movies like “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Love Actually” among my favorite films of all time, and why do I return to “The Holiday,” “The Family Stone,” “The Ice Harvest,” “This Christmas,” and “Home for the Holidays” time and time again—and not just in December?

I think it’s a number of factors really—many of which are the very ones that make this season the most wonderful time of the year.

There is much that is tired and trite, hollow, cynical, and sentimental about the holidays. Much cashing in. Sometimes the entire environment sounds as shallow and tinny as poorly recorded, overplayed Christmas music on small, cheap department store speakers. Too much of the season is about buying, spending, acquiring—and ridiculous reciprocation calculations (Should I get him a present? He’s probably gonna get me one. We’ve got to invite them to our party since they invited us to theirs, right?)

The crass commercialism of the holiday supposedly in honor of the impoverished peasant living among and fighting for the marginalized, subsistence, villagers and day laborers of First Century Palestine is, like so many things related to him, a most tragic irony.

What is bought and sold more than anything else during this season is us—our very souls.

And yet. And yet. In spite, of all these violent assaults on Jesus, all these adulterations and perversions of the meaning of his life, something sacred, something magic, something undeniable survives. This, more than anything else, demonstrates the true power of the man, his message, and the holiday that honors and celebrates his birth. That something of the ineffable, something of the transformational, something of the true spark of divinity survives the full on assault of the American capitalist religion is truly a Christmas miracle.

And the best Christmas movies embody this. They tap into the magic and they quiet all the clamor to capture the love.

Jesus dared to live love. His life (and too soon his death) was the result of his conviction that God is love, that God loves everyone equally and unconditionally. (It’s another tragic irony that the religion that rose up around him has all but lost this). Jesus’ radical, yet only-hope-for-humanity notion that God is not an angry, distant deity, but a present loving parent who loves us no matter what we do (or fail to, including living out love) survives in spite of the religion that bears his name’s insistence on being like every other religion. And it somehow survives Christmas, too.

Love survives.

We ignore, abandon, dilute, and contaminate love, and yet love remains. Mixing our needs and projections and illusions and neuroses and insecurities and attempts to control with love can’t kill love any more than mixing our greed and gluttony and selfishness and tribalism and sentimentality with Christmas can kill its spirit. We alter it to be sure—and what remains often bears little resemblance to love or Christmas—yet we can still glimpse love, still feel the meaning and magic beneath, above, around, and, on occasion, through the small tears in the fabric of the blanket of commercialism smothering Christmas.

The best of Christmas movies provide us with this glimpse of love, which is captured so brilliantly by Richard Curtis in the prologue to his Christmas masterpiece, “Love Actually.”

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there—fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge—they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspicion . . . love actually is all around.”

The characters in “Love Actually” or “The Holiday” risk and receive love, and it’s this not particularly dignified or newsworthy phenomenon that is a metaphor in microcosm for the macrocosmic love Christmas is meant to commemorate and celebrate.

Among the best movies ever made, “”It’s A Wonderful Life” is also about love at Christmas—about a good man who truly lives in love by turning his back on greed and selfishness and extending himself on the behalf of others (the textbook definition of love). It captures love on many levels—the love of a couple (George and Mary, “George Bailey I’ll love you to the day I die”), the love of family (both George’s home of origin and the one he and Mary build), the love of others, and community, and ultimately, the divine source of all love (which comes to George through Clarence and eventually others). This last is particularly important, and the meaning of Christmas—we experience God’s love through those others who are willing to be conduits of it for us; others experience God’s love through us when we are willing to undergo ego death, becoming empty of anything but love.

The best of Christmas movies, like the best of art and religion and philosophy, remind us of what really matters. They inspire us toward the best versions of ourselves and provide us with much needed perspective. They say, like all truth, that love, not status or money or power or presents or bills or public opinion, matters most of all, and, as Clarence wrote to George, “No man is failure who has friends.”

The End of the World As We Know It

If the Philistines are at the gate of American culture, it’s on the inside.

We’re witnessing the end of an era, the twilight of American culture.

As a wise person once said, “America has become a storefront for a corporate mob.”

We are a culture of constant consumption, gluttons who mostly stuff ourselves with regurgitated entertainment devoid of anything meaningful or of lasting value. As social critic James Twitchell put it, “There is barely an empty space in our culture not already carrying commercial messages.”

So many things being sold to us. So much noise.

We live in a “systematic suppression of silence,” George Steiner said.

It’s the end of the world as we know it—and how do most of us feel? Just fine. At least we do as long as they keep us distracted, entertained, medicated, and consuming.

Morris Berman says in his book, “The Twilight of American Culture” that there are four factors present in the collapse of a civilization. Name one of them that doesn’t apply to us:

1) Accelerating social and economic inequality.
2) Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems.
3) Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness.
4) Spiritual death—the emptying out of cultural content and repackaging it into formulas.

In the same book, Berman writes, “We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotion/commercial bullshit that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”

Are we talking about the Roman Empire or the American one?

According to Sallust, Rome in 80 B.C.E. was a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, and a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows.

Sounds like us to me. Our sickeningly greedy culture is of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations. Too many are numb to and ignorant of everything that truly matters. And we are a public diverted by NASCAR, sitcoms, reality TV, transient, trashy novels, trite, tiresome, retread movies, extremist political pundits, and the pathetic freak show parade of celebrity culture—and I’m not even talking about the too-easy targets of Palin and Paris, The Situation and the Octomom, and Bush and Beck.

We celebrate ignorance and inanity and incivility—and we like it loud and obnoxious and arrogant.

Are we Philistines? Read the definition and decide for yourself— a smug, ignorant, especially middle-class person who is regarded as being indifferent or antagonistic to artistic and cultural values.

The problem isn’t the occasional consumption of cultural crap. It’s the steady diet of it—it’s not knowing it’s crap.

You may wonder what’s made me so cheery, why a hopeful, glass-half-full-guy like me has suddenly become a sandwich-boarded sidewalk seer wildly and wide-eyedly proclaiming the end is nigh.

Easy. It’s my front-row seat to the apocalyptic end of art and culture, justice and compassion. But the reason I’m ranting about it right now is an incident that happened last week in (of all places) New York at a place known for enlightening events—the 92nd Street Y.

This particular event was a conversation between Steve Martin, the writer and actor, and Deborah Solomon, who writes a weekly interview column for “The New York Times Magazine.”

About halfway through their conversation, a Y representative handed Solomon a note asking her to talk more about Martin’s career in show business and less about the art world, the subject of his latest novel, “An Object of Beauty.”

The following day, the Y sent out an apology for the event and the promise of a refund.

“The Y never told me what they wanted,” Solomon said, adding that Martin, a longtime friend, had asked her to conduct the interview, and that she determined that a conversation focused on the art world and his book seemed most timely and interesting. “Frankly, you would think that an audience in New York, at the 92nd Street Y, would be interested in hearing about art and artists. I had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it’s like to host the Oscars or appear in “It’s Complicated” with Alec Baldwin. I think the Y, which is supposedly a champion of the arts, has behaved very crassly and is reinforcing the most philistine aspects of a culture that values celebrity and award shows over art.”

And I couldn’t agree more.

Entertain us or we’ll whine and want our money back. Make us laugh, not think!

But the event and the response it received points out part of the problem. Steve Martin, who happens to be a good writer and storyteller, is a celebrity. His novels most likely get published and read because he’s a movie star. It seems to me that the very thing that gets him published and reviewed and read (or at least purchased), namely celebrity, is the very thing that came back to bite him in this instance. Celebrity culture sycophants wanted to hear not about art and literature, but mindless movie star trivia.

Celebrity books are a bane for novelists like me. Rare is the day that goes by that I’m not working hard to become a better writer, but because like Emily, I’m nobody, who are you? I send my books out into the loud, crowded world armed with only reviews and word-of-mouth. Recently, I was doing a signing in Tampa at a Barnes and Noble, for which a very modest crowd showed up, when the manager told me that just a few days before, the store couldn’t hold the huge throng that turned out for Tori Spelling’s new book.

Who knew Tori Spelling wrote? Let alone had more than one book out?

How should it make me feel that Tori Spelling, Brittany Spears, and Justin Beiber’s books outsell mine? (By a lot!)

Serious literature, fine film, great art—all still exist, but are too often buried under the loud, crass, kitsch, shallow, hollow, derivative drivel of consumertainment. We’ve blurred the lines between news and entertainment, between art and entertainment, between what truly matters and what matters not at all, and it’s making us trivial, silly people.

We pay for diversion, to be distracted, to keep from truly being moved or inspired or challenged, to fill the void with noise to keep ourselves from meditating on our mortality, from the time and space and silence required for serious thinking and reading and contemplating and the crafting of soul. And we’re doing it everywhere—not just in tiny Deep South towns, but in New York City.

Will you join me in the revolution? Let’s start the avalanche. Just because poison is being served doesn’t mean we have to eat it. When’s the last time you challenged yourself with a work of art? How long has it been since you refused to be bought or distracted or mesmerized into moronity?

Today’s the day. Turn off the TV. Turn your back on the insulting 3D idiocy at the Cineplex. Close the contrivance and crass manipulation of hyper-commercial novels. No longer submit to the artless assault of shallow entertainment. And begin your search for works that challenge and inspire, provoke and nurture, educate and entertain.

What Sven Birkerts said applies to all great art: “If literature survives at all, it is as a retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.”

Refuse to assimilate today! Crack open a good book and join me in a revolution that feels like an inspiriting monastic retreat.

Life is but a Dream

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sweet, sad, sublime, “Jack Goes Boating” is a small film about the biggest of things—things like love and loneliness and relationships and dreams and imagination and fear and betrayal and unforgiveness and life and death. It deals delicately with the beginning of one relationship and the deterioration and death of another.

Jack (Philip Seymour Hoffman—who also directs the film) and Connie (Amy Ryan) are two single people who on their own might continue to recede into the anonymous background of the city, but in each other begin to find the courage and desire to pursue their budding relationship. In contrast, the couple that introduced them, Clyde (John Ortiz) and Lucy (Daphne Rubin-Vega), are confronting unresolved issues in their marriage.

Jack is a limo driver with vague dreams of landing a job with the MTA and an obsession with reggae that has prompted him to begin a half-hearted attempt at growing dreadlocks. He spends most of his time hanging out with his best friend and fellow driver Clyde and Clyde’s wife Lucy.

The couple set Jack up with Connie, Lucy’s co-worker at a Brooklyn funeral home. Being with Connie inspires Jack to learn to cook, pursue a new career and take swimming lessons from Clyde so he can give Connie the romantic boat ride she dreams of. But as Jack and Connie cautiously circle commitment, Clyde and Lucy’s marriage begins to disintegrate. From there, we watch as each couple comes face to face with the inevitable path of their relationship.

The four characters who people “Jack Goes Boating” are isolated icebergs, adrift, bumping into one another, the bulk of their beings unseen, floating beneath the surface, each deeper and darker than they appear.

Jack seems simple, even slow, but he is guileless and deliberate. He, no less than Connie, Clyde, and Lucy, is wounded, suffering from insult and injury, but most of all from isolation.

Jack and Connie, at the very beginning of their relationship, bring into it the damage and baggage from their previous lives and relationships. Clyde and Lucy have not only this, but the open wounds they’ve inflicted on one another. Lucy tells Jack, “You’ve never been in a relationship. A lot happens. Lot of good things. Lot of things you wouldn’t wish on your enemy.” Lucy has hurt Clyde in ways she wouldn’t wish on her enemy, and though Clyde says he’s worked through them, there’s real, deep-seated pain just beneath his mask of near constant conviviality, just behind his kind eyes.

Perhaps more than anything else, “Jack Goes Boating” is about dreams. Dreaming—actually imagining a different reality, is the beginning of all things. “Jack Goes Boating” vividly and profoundly demonstrates the connection between imagination and accomplishment, between visualization and manifestation, and shows how closely and intimately related to love they are.

On the shelf beside Connie’s bed, half hidden by a picture frame is a word carved from wooden letters affixed to a stand. Only three letters of the word are visible, but I’m certain the word is dream. It sits there next to where Connie dreams, where Jack and Connie lie as they softly say what they’re looking for in their “dream” partner.

Jack and Connie dream of lives different than the ones they have—lives less lonely, lives lived in love with a loved one.

What is required for such lives? The desire, of course, then the dream—the imagining, the visualizing—and then the leap, the choice to live in love not fear, the action that enables love to conquer, then vanquish, fear.
It all begins with the thing Einstein said was far more important than intellect. Imagination.

In the myth of the Tower of Babel, when the Lord comes down and sees what the humans are up to—building a tower to heaven, building a civilization, making a name for themselves—the Lord says because of their imaginations nothing they dream up and set their collective minds and hands to will be impossible for them, and so confused their language so they couldn’t understand each other. Like Jack, and the people in the story of the Tower of Babel, our greatest limitation is our imagination.

To accomplish what he does, Jack uses visualization—actually, vividly imagining his actions before he takes them—something Hoffman, the director, uses to full affect.

Creative visualization refers to the practice of seeking to affect the outer world via changing our thoughts. It’s the technique of using our imaginations to visualize specific behaviors or events occurring in our lives. The practice is a common spiritual exercise and is often used in sports psychology.

Connie wants to go boating. Jack wants to take her, but can’t swim. Connie wants someone to cook for her, something she’s never had. Jack wants to, but doesn’t know how. Through love—love as an act of imagination, love as an action, love as both the dreaming and doing that conquers all fear—Jack becomes an excellent swimmer and cook, heroic in the way only the truest lovers can be.

“Jack Goes Boating” is witty and funny and charming and likable, but it’s also, by turns, sad, even heartbreaking. Amy Ryan, as ever, is extraordinary. Philip Seymour Hoffman is, as usual, brilliant and beautiful, and in addition to being one of my favorite actors, doing the most interesting and profoundly moving work these days, he may also soon be one of my favorite directors. He’s off to an amazing start. Go boating and swimming and cooking with Jack as soon as you can. Learn from his fearlessness. Be inspired by his love. And like him, visualize the life you want to have.

I drove over a hundred miles to go boating with Jack. The film is so good it’d be worth a trip ten times that. Maybe more. No, definitely more. Infinitely more.

Alone With All That Can Happen

The morning after watching “Solitary Man,” I woke up feeling utterly and completely alone. I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with the movie—I often experience an intense sense of isolation—but the timing was interesting and thought-provoking.

Being alone isn’t the same as being lonely. Many times I feel the most connected when I am most alone—something Lord Byron captured so beautifully in his phrase, “In solitude, where we are least alone.”

Being with others isn’t the same as not being lonely. Certain people, certain settings and situations, make me feel more lonely, not less. A social gathering involving small talk, cocktail chatter, mundane, surfaces inanities—and what social gathering doesn’t include such things—usually makes me feel far more isolated and alone than when I’m actually by myself.

Whether we’re alone or with others, in one sense we’re always ultimately alone. As Thomas Wolfe said, “Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every human.”

Even as we appear to be sharing the same experiences—including intensely intimate experiences like making love or sharing a meal or talking about God—we’re always having our own unique experience. Oscar Wilde’s observation that there are as many publics as there are people is true of everything. It’s why I say there are some six and half billion gods. No two of us have identical notions of what the word ‘god’ means. So whatever God is and is not, we’re left with our beliefs and perceptions, and though heavily influenced by culture and family, indoctrination and education, they’re still utterly and uniquely only our own.

Beneath all our labels, beyond all our associations and group identities, it’s just us. Ultimately alone. Solitary us. Yet there is an us. We are part of a planet, a species, an interdependent system. We are able to connect, to touch each others’ souls, be inside one another in profound and meaningful ways. At this very moment, you and I are having a personal, intimate (hopefully) meaningful exchange. I am offering you the water of my words and you are drinking them in.

And yet. And yet.

Even as we have truly deep and intensely intimate connections, we remain, in a very real and certain sense, alone. And it’s out of that aloneness, that sometimes painful experience of isolation, we reach out—out of our solitude—to an other.

Solitary means “being, living, or going alone or without companions; saddened by isolation; keeping a prisoner apart from others; being at once single and isolated; occurring singly and not as part of a group or cluster.”

Occurring singly and not being part of a group is a good thing. Emerson said, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”

In one sense, the more evolved and self-actualized, the more true to our quidity, the more we refuse to conform, the more alone we will be—less able to fit, less a part of group think and speak. We will not benefit from the safety found in numbers. But this evolution of our beings will also simultaneously, counter intuitively, lead us to a greater awareness of our connectedness with all people, with all things. Connected at very deep levels; completely unconnected at shallower levels.

These are thoughts I’m having as I think of solitude and my experience in proximity to the film. They are not necessarily in the film except in very implicit ways. Ben Kalmen’s solitude originates from the deepest most profound place—his mortality—but his outward isolation isn’t from self-actualization, but its opposite, not out of love, but fear.

“Solitary Man” tells the story of Ben Kalmen, a fifty-something New Yorker and former successful car dealer, who through his own bad choices lost his entire business.

When the film opens, Ben’s on the verge of a comeback, but some of the same motivations that led to his demise are threatening to take him down again. He’s divorced from Nancy, his college sweetheart and the one person who knows him better than anyone. Although he still finds the time to hang out with his daughter Susan and his adoring grandson, she breaks off contact when she discovers he's seeing one of her friends. His girlfriend Jordan is the daughter of a very influential businessman who's on the board of a major auto manufacturer.

If Ben can just keep his hubris in check for a little while longer, he will be back as big as ever. But circumstances place him in very close proximity with the one girl he shouldn’t touch, throwing everything into jeopardy.

“Solitary Man” is solid story elevated by great performances. Michael Douglas is brilliant as Ben, and the other players hovering around the edges of his solitariness hang right there with him.

Ben’s isolation is more an acting out, a childish, defensive way of actually isolating others that leads him to himself be isolated. He’s a solitary man because of bad behavior, because he’s incapable of intimacy.

The sense of isolation—even the experience itself—is part of the human condition. It is not the same as never connecting, as being unable or unwilling to—which seems the case for Ben.

Even in our ultimate aloneness we can connect with others. In fact, we can connect because of it, through it. Sharing our feelings of isolation with another human who is open about his or her own feelings of separation frees us from our solitary confinement prison cell.

Solitude is a good and necessary part of existence. We are our best selves when we have the time and space to be ourselves, to just be—in the beauty and stillness of silence and solitude. Einstein said, “I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”

It comes down to balance. Too much or too little or the wrong kind of solitude negatively impacts our souls. Finding trusted friends who are themselves seeking this same balance and committing to each other to aid in the process is invaluable. As Rilke so wisely put it, “I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.”

Learn from Ben’s mistakes. Identify those in your life who protect your good solitude and make sure you’re protecting theirs. And in those times when you feel all alone, be fully present, and don’t just be alone. Be alone with the promise and possibility of all that can happen.

A Prescription for Society’s Sick Soul

Recently, I ended a column with these words:

Story can be sacred.
Movies can be magic.
Sharing the meaningful ones with our children is nothing short of shamanistic.

I’ve long considered what I do as a novelist, as a storyteller, as a teacher, to be shamanistic. If story is sacred, then to be a storyteller is a sacred calling. It’s how I view what I do, why I take it so seriously.

When I closed my column titled “Film School” with the word “shamanistic,” I knew I’d eventually revisit the concept here, but when, this past weekend at the 11th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference, Connie May Fowler referred to writers as shamans, I knew it would be sooner rather than later.

It was out of my conviction that story is sacred and storytelling is a sacred calling that I started the Gulf Coast Writers Conference over a decade ago, and as I listened to Connie’s keynote address this year, heard her talk about how important story is, how writers hallucinate as they write and readers hallucinate as they read and how spiritual and magic that is, I knew I was in the presence of a kindred spirit, a sister, a fellow shaman.

Interestingly, we initially called the conference the Gulf Coast Writers and Storytellers Conference, and only shortened it over the years out of necessity. Our conference is a celebration and exploration of story, and is, therefore, a gathering of shamans.

Shaman is an anthropological term referring to the spiritual leader of indigenous or native peoples. Shamans are healers and priests and counselors and storytellers.

Shamans are intermediaries or messengers between the human world and the spirit world. They treat ailments and illnesses by mending the soul. By alleviating issues affecting the soul, they restore individuals’ entire being to balance and wholeness. They also enter supernatural realms or dimensions to obtain solutions to problems afflicting the community. Shamans visit other worlds to bring guidance to misguided souls, to alleviate suffering caused by soul sickness, removing elements that were never intended to be there. As priests or intermediaries, shamans stand between two worlds—one seen, the other not—serving as a bridge between the two.

A priest or priestess is a go-between, a person straddling two worlds, having a foot planted in each. He or she is a messenger, a representative, an emissary. The same is true of storytellers. We plumb the depths of the underworld and being back messages. We dig deep beneath the surface and excavate the stories buried there.

I became aware that I was a shaman very early in life, and became active in adolescence—studying story, using story, telling stories, writing stories. My pursuit of my calling has led me to study religion, philosophy, psychology, and story itself. Like Connie, and so many other shamans I know, I’m not a hobbyist, not doing this just for fun. I’m driven to tell stories, obsessed with story itself and continually improving my storytelling techniques.

It’s an odd and interesting time to be a shaman. I’m a shaman in a culture and at a time when serious story and careful, sacred storytelling is devalued, where the novel is increasingly marginalized, yet where, ironically, our need for narrative has never been greater. As a people, as a nation, as a culture, we are soul sick and need the mending, balance, and wholeness only sacred, true story can bring.

There’s so much noise in our world, so much inanity, so much that assaults our senses, hearts, and minds. So much. Just so so much.

If we’re not very careful to filter input, to guard our quite time, to thoughtfully and mindfully select our shamans and stories, then the vast majority of what we’re assaulted with is shallow, silly, empty, and corrosive. Like junk food, much of what’s on offer is wasted calories that neither nourishes or satisfies.

Sacred story is transformative. It speaks to the deepest part of us and calls forth our best selves. The journey of narrative mirrors the journey we’re on, and reminds us that it’s the epic hero’s journey as ancient as time and myth, as old as soul, originating when consciousness did.

For our souls’ sake we should honor true shamans and the sacred stories they tell. We should open ourselves up to the magic of story and let it work its wondrous work in us, welcoming the expanding and challenging, emptying and refilling.

Don’t settle for substitutes. Seek out true shamans and the magic stories they tell today, and began sharing your own true, sacred stories with others. If we all got in touch with the shaman in our souls, it would change not only us, and our children, but the whole world entire.

Once Again and Again and Again

A man and a woman.

A mother and a father.

Divorced.

Having failed in relationships, trying again.

After dating a while, they’re ready to have sex—or think they are.

Nervous.

Scared.

Risking. Pressing through.

Then, suddenly, they go from awkward and uncomfortable to her crying and him unable to continue.

Is it possible you might be who I need you to be? she asks.

It is. He is—and is not. And that’s life—or at least a reflection of it—art that is a recognizable reflection of human experiences more than a few of us are likely to have.

It’s a tender, true, affecting scene—one of many, not from a feature film, but from a network television show.

There are actually “film” people who disdain television, as if those who work in it—writers, directors, actors, producers—are less somehow, as if the screen size isn’t the only thing that’s smaller. But some of the very best filmed fiction is made for television. Shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Six Feet Under,” “Gilmore Girls,” “House,” “Mad Men,” and others are as good as anything on offer at the local movie theater—and these series are doing the equivalent of several feature-length films season after season.

If it’s true that TV is a writer’s medium and film is a director’s, it stands to reason that the best television has to offer will be richer, deeper, more intellectual and emotionally satisfying than all but the very best movies. Television allows for the time it takes to tell a complex tale while truly exploring the characters propelling it forward. It’s why in general, novels adapt better to TV than film. It’s also why so many accomplished and acclaimed writers, producers, actors, and even directors are drawn to television—particularly cable.

Recently, “Entertainment Weekly” listed what it deems as the five best divorce movies ever: “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “The War of the Roses,” “An Unmarried Woman,” and “The Odd Couple,” and maybe they are, but none of them delves as deeply or does so with such sustained exploration as does a too-early canceled TV show.

Divorce is death. A painful end to something at one point you never wanted to end—and maybe still don’t. Failure. Rejection. Disappointment. Embarrassment.

Divorce is death, yet life continues. Not only your life, but that of your onetime spouse. Like an apparition, your ex haunts your life, a continual reminder of what was, of what might have been, of what is, of what can never be.

Divorce opens a family up and invites new people in. Lawyers. Counselors. Friends. Lovers. Strangers.

In the best of situations, divorce is difficult.

And this difficulty is handled deftly in the divorce drama, “Once and Again”—one of the best adult hour-long dramas network television has ever produced.
Lily Manning (played by the breathtakingly beautiful and perfectly cast, Sela Ward) is a 40ish suburban soccer mom living in Deerfield, Illinois. Recently separated from her philandering husband Jake (Jeffrey Nordling), Lily is raising her two daughters, insecure, anxiety-ridden 14-year-old Grace (Julia Whelan), and wide-eyed, innocent 9-year-old Zoe (Meredith Deane). For support, she turns to her more free-spirited younger sister, Judy (Marin Hinkle), with whom she works at their bookstore called My Sister's Bookstore.

Lily’s life changes when she meets Rick Sammler (Billy Campbell) in the principal’s office of Grace’s school. Rick is a single father and co-head of an architectural firm, Sammler/Cassili Associates, which is located in downtown Chicago. Rick has been divorced from the rigid Karen (Susanna Thompson) for three years and has two children, Eli (Shane West), a 16-year-old basketball player with a learning disability, and sensitive 12-year-old Jessie (Evan Rachel Wood), who longs for the days before her family’s disintegration.

Lily and Rick share an immediate mutual attraction and begin dating. Their budding relationship causes problems in both of their respective families. Grace strongly objects to Lily and Rick’s relationship as she still hopes to see her parents get back together. Karen, a public interest attorney at the downtown law firm of Harris, Riegert, and Sammler, is worried about the toll Rick’s new relationship would take on their children, particularly Jessie, who is shy and emotionally fragile. She is also working through her own feelings of jealousy that Rick is in a new serious relationship.

“Once and Again” was created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the same team behind “Thirtysomething,” and both shows demonstrate their brilliance for dramas that capture the nuance of entire epochs of modern American life.

Though the show begins with and centers around the romance and relationship between Lily and Rick, it also deals extensively with their children and to a lesser degree with their exes, Jake and Karen, and their ongoing struggles to find peace, joy, and love in the post-divorce environment.

Like “Thirtysomething,” “Once and Again” is smart, literate, well-written, affecting, timely, timeless, and dramatic without too often being melodramatic.

It’s also at times dizzily, intoxicatingly, wildly romantic. Rick and Lily have an earned and unexpected intensity and intimacy that combines the best of heady, youthful infatuation with the scars and wisdom age and experience and rejection and failure and the disappointment that divorce brings.

Few things are as therapeutic as talking. Few things need the healing therapy talk can bring as much as divorce. Each episode of “Once and Again,” as they’re dealing with divorce and death and life and love and betrayal and fear and loss and hope, has the characters, shot in black and white, sit and talk—to us, the audience, making us their therapist, making us privy to their most hidden thoughts and feelings, making us more complicit in their lies and lives—and more compassionate. This makes TV more like a book—we know what characters are thinking, get to be in their heads, know what the other characters they interacting with cannot.

In “Once and Again,” as in life, the past is prologue. Everything that comes around, comes around, not just once, but again. And again. Every seeming new issue in every seeming new relationship bares an amazing similarity to the issues and relationships that came before. We are products. We are patterns. We have dynamics, issues, wounds, experiences. We carry who we are into each new relationship, including what we’ve learned and lost, gained and changed, which makes the biggest part of our new relationships not new at all.

Divorce is difficult and dramatic and traumatic, and there’s no one who hasn’t been touched by its ripples. Fortunately, through story, we can learn and heal and grow and become more and better, and be our best selves even in brokenness, and, as far as divorce dramas go, “Once and Again” is a good place to start. Give it a try. You might watch it once. Or, like me, you might watch it again and again.

Continental Divide

Shakespeare rightly noted: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

This is particularly true of the love found in romance fiction where the genre convention is to introduce two potential lovers with enormous chemistry and desire then place as many obstacles between them as possible.

Obstacles to love are too numerous to name, but they’re dwindling. No longer are class, race, sex credible impediments. Part of the reason “Notting Hill” works so well is that fame as a hindrance in our celebrity-obsessed culture is so believable. And with “Going the Distance” we have another. The world is shrinking to be sure, but not enough to solve the enormous issues of a bicoastal relationship.

Drew Barrymore and Justin Long star in this romantic comedy about a long-distance romance that may be worth fighting for. Garrett (Long) is still nursing the wounds from a recent breakup when he meets Erin (Barrymore), an unflinchingly honest girl with a big talent for bar trivia. Hitting it off immediately, the pair spend a romantic summer together in New York City. It was supposed to be a summer fling, but as fall approaches and Erin returns to San Francisco, the spark is still there. Subsequently dividing his days between working and hitting the bars with best friends Box (Jason Sudeikis) and Dan (Charlie Day), Garrett drops everything whenever Erin calls. The more Garrett's phone rings, the more his pals begin to suspect that their drinking buddy is taking the relationship a little too seriously. And they're not the only ones; Erin's sister, Corrine (Christina Applegate), is keen to ensure that her smitten sibling doesn't repeat the mistakes of her past, and she makes no attempts to sugarcoat the fact that she disapproves of the coast-to-coast romance. But the heart wants what the heart wants, and as the texting becomes more intense, both Garrett and Erin start to suspect that their summer fling may just be the real thing.

“Going the Distance” is a stellar romantic comedy—genuine and genuinely funny. Its honest, real, credible look at the issues of long distance dating never feel false or forced. The film never over reaches in the way so many do, never gives us unearned emotion or over-the-top melodramatic plot twists. It’s a comedy about adults for adults with mature, often sexual, humor that rises organically out of who the characters are, their relationship, and the situation they find themselves in.

Barrymore is, as usual, adorable, and she and Long make a sweet, convincing couple in a relationship worth working out. Speaking of working . . . the chosen professions of the couple (print journalist and music promoter) not only provide authentic challenges and obstacles, but reflect the upheaval both industries are experiencing right now.

“Going the Distance” works so well, is so good, that it is easily the most fun, enjoyable experience I’ve had in a movie theater in a very long time, and I can already hear the film knocking on the door of my top ten romcom list. It’s the kind of romantic comedy you can give yourself over to and not regret the morning after.

The Quiet American

“The American” is a quiet, little film, visually arresting, slowly affecting—a well crafted work of art, but on the artisan more than artist end of the artistic spectrum.

At one point, an insightful and observant priest notes that the main character, who presents himself as a photographer, has the hands of a craftsman more than an artist. It’s hard to think of a better way to describe the film itself. Well built. Beautiful. Work of craftsmanship. Not an artistic masterpiece.

Academy Award winner George Clooney stars in the title role of this suspense thriller. As an assassin, Jack (Clooney) is constantly on the move and always alone. After a job in Sweden ends more harshly than expected for this American abroad, Jack retreats to the Italian countryside. He relishes being away from death for a spell as he holes up in a small medieval town. While there, Jack takes an assignment to construct a weapon for a mysterious contact, Mathilde (Thekla Reuten). Savoring the peaceful quietude he finds in the mountains of Abruzzo, Jack accepts the friendship of local priest Father Benedetto (Paolo Bonacelli) and pursues a relationship with a beautiful prostitute named Clara (Violante Placido). Jack and Clara’s time together seems hopeful and free of danger, but is such a thing possible for a man like Jack?

“The American” was written by Rowan Joffe, based on the novel “A Very Private Gentleman,” by Martin Booth, and directed by Anton Corbijn, a Dutch photographer who has worked extensively in the music industry. His feature film debut was “Control,” a film about the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis.

Cinematography is often referred to as painting with light or writing with light, which is exactly what Corbijin does so brilliantly. Every frame of the film is picturesque—carefully composed, exquisitely captured. In this age of digital video, in the era when film is supposedly “dead,” it’s good to imagine holding up a strip of film to the light and considering how each frame is a still photograph. Corbijin’s work is a good reminder, and it makes me think that a photographer making a movie is like a poet writing a novel—any sacrifice in narrative drive is often made up for by beauty, artistry, and craftsmanship.

Like the film itself, Clooney’s performance is stripped down. Quiet. Sparse. Spartan. There’s none of the usual Clooney charm, and the movie is the better for it. Also like the film, Violante Placido is breathtakingly beautiful, her body carefully crafted by a true artist, every shot of her a photograph worth framing and hanging. Equally as beautiful, though in a very different way is the conscience of this well crafted film—Father Benedetto, played brilliantly by Paolo Bonacelli. He provides humble, helpful insight, wisdom, and service, an ego-less spiritual caretaker worthy of confessing to.

If over-the-top, cartoonish Hollywood action-adventure movies have left you unsatisfied, try this art house thriller. The quiet ride it provides is far more effective, far more enthralling, far more resonate than big-budget bombs and one-dimensional good and bad guys could ever be.

Film School

Movies are magic.

Or can be.

The good ones, like all good art, don’t merely entertain. They enlighten. They inspire. They educate—an education of heart far more than head.

They transform us.

They challenge us.

They change us.

Of course, there are plenty of people who find film frivolous. Pragmatists, who, unlike me, fail to find meaning in fiction, in made-up stories, in myth and metaphor. It’s sad. Stories are sacred. Or can be. They speak to our souls. They have the ability to convey and communicate more truth, more wisdom, more of what matters most, than any other form of communication.

“The Film Club,” a memoir about movies and other things that really matter, by novelist, David Gilmour, demonstrates these truths quietly, but effectively, subtly, but with plenty of profundity.

Gilmour, an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his 15-year-old son Jesse to do his homework, realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, and offers him an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent—but he must watch three movies a week of his father’s choosing.

Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from “True Romance” to “Rosemary’s Baby” to “Showgirls,” films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian Depalma, Billy Wilder, and others. The movies got them talking about Jesse’s life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies.

Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship—and their own lives changed in surprising ways.

Can watching movies with a novelist/film critic dad really be better than going to school? Is this ingenious parenting or grounds for being declared unfit? You can decide for yourself. My answer? Well, I happen to have a fifteen year-old son, who truly excels in school—far and away better than I ever did—and, I happen to be a novelist and (something like) a film critic, and I truly believe I could provide him a better education than he could receive virtually anywhere. I’ll only add two caveats: 1) Unlike Gilmour, literature would be a big part of my curriculum, and 2) I’d hire a math and science tutor.

Gilmour gambled. He risked a lot in attempt not just to educate, but to save his son. As he puts it, “The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics — Rebecca [Jesse’s girlfriend], Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes.”

The book is filled with insight and wisdom like:

“The second time you see something is really the first time. You need to know how it ends before you can appreciate how beautifully it’s put together from the beginning.”

“It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.”

“The beautiful girl in the Thunder Bird in “American Graffiti” who keeps disappearing is an example of Proustian contemplation that possession and desire are mutually exclusive, that for the girl to be the girl, she must always be pulling away.”

“You can’t be with a woman you can’t go to the movies with.”
All of which leads Jesse, his son, to certain insights of his own: “It’s like when you’re watching a film you really love. You don’t want somebody trying to be interesting. You want them just to love it.”

Gilmour offers much to contemplate about the movies he chooses to reach his son with, too. Within just a few introductory paragraphs he reveals interesting information about the movies as well as helping his son (and the reader) have a more meaningful experience with it.

He reveals how Stephen King hated Stanley Kubrick’s handling of “The Shining,” said Kubrick made movies to hurt people; how Brando improvised the scene in “On the Waterfront” when he takes the girl’s glove and puts it on his hand; how Steven Spielberg made his directing debut with a truck-chase thriller called “Duel,” which he still watches periodically to remind himself of “how he did it,” how Spielberg said, “You have to be young to be so unapologetically sure-footed;” how Howard Hawks said that a good film must have at least “three good scenes and no bad ones.” And so much more!

Reading “The Film Club” and reflecting on it, reminds me of the way in which I used movies to connect with and educate my daughter over the years—particularly when she was entering early adolescence. We watched all sorts of films—including the horror movies that are such a rite of passage for teenagers—but most of all I designed a cinematic curriculum in feminism, attempting to empower her by showing her just how kickass teenage girls like Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars and Rory Gilmore could be.

This past weekend, my now twenty-year old kickass daughter came home from college with the textbook from her film class, and we connected over and celebrated cinema all over again as I devoured the tome in our kitchen, in the car (as she drove), and at the table of the Chinese restaurant where we went to lunch. The experience was all the dad of an amazing, kickass co-ed could ask for, and it made me so very grateful that we, like the Gilmours, had started our very own version of the film club so many years ago and that it continues to this day (we even watched “The Killer Inside Me” while she was here.)

Gilmour picks some truly great films to share with his son, and the book includes the complete list. I recommend reading the book and watching the movies—and if you can share the experience with someone, form a “film club” of your own, all the better.
Story can be sacred.


Movies can be magic.

Sharing the meaningful ones with our children is nothing short of shamanistic.

Greatness Within Our Grasp

A few days ago, I witnessed a talented, young artist get discouraged to the point of sulking because one element of the project he was working on didn’t turn out the way he had hoped.

It was interesting to witness.

“I suck,” he said. “I’m terrible.” This, after a quick experimentation he had spent a short time on didn’t work—or didn’t work in the way he wanted it to.

He’s barely out of his teens, has only relatively recently grown serious about his art, had worked on this particular part of his project for a very short time, and was quite dispirited because it wasn’t an instant success.

The disappointment and depressing condition the young man experienced were temporary, and he’s back at work on his craft—and probably was later the same day—but it reminded me of just how much hard work, discipline, dedication, patience, practice, time, blood, sweat, tears, failure, and investment becoming truly proficient at something requires.

I can’t know for sure, but the young artist, like nearly all young artists, seemed to expect to be able to accomplish what he wanted to because he wanted to, because he has talent, but what he lacks, what prevents him from being able to achieve what he’s striving for isn’t talent. It’s something else—something that makes talent the smallest component of the equation in any endeavor.

One of the most dangerous mentalities we can have is the easy, lazy belief that “you either have it, or you don’t.”

I work with creatives all the time, mostly writers, who want to—no, check that—who expect to be good, even genius early in their development (notice I didn’t say career) and in early attempts or first drafts.

Only people who don’t know any better think they can be good at something from the jump—which describes most novices and people trying to do something new. We don’t know because we’re new, and either we think that what we do is good or we’re so overwhelmed by its failure, we abandon it. Both cause us to give up—the first, on truly becoming good, the second, for good.

Both tragic responses fail to perceive the truth—being great at something is not a birthright, but the result of busting our asses.

I’m not saying we’re not born with talents, not given certain innate gifts and natural abilities, that we don’t have specific interests and internal proclivities that point to potential, just that they are little more than a place to start.

Talent is a seed. Full of potential—not much more.

I know a lot of talented people. The world is full of them. Hell, prison is full of them. During my time as a prison chaplain, I was amazed at the staggering amount of talent languishing behind the chain link and razor wire.

Talent inside prison is like talent anywhere. It’s all the same. Just potential. Just possibility.

What we do with our gifts and talents, how we develop them, what we invest in them, that’s what determines outcome, that’s what makes the difference between success and failure.

And it’s no small investment that’s required to become truly great.

Experts agree that to truly excel at something, to be world class, requires ten years or ten thousand hours of a certain type of the right kind of practice.

Two inspiring and encouraging and wise books that make a convincing case for this are “Talent Is Overrated: What really separates world-class performers from everybody else” by Geoff Colvin and “Outliers: The story of success” by Malcolm Gladwell.”

If the frustrated young artist who says he sucks after failing in certain ways at his new craft and you and I want to become masters, we must invest a decade of our lives to deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice, according to Colvin, is “designed specifically to improve performance, often with a teacher’s help; it can be repeated a lot; feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally, and it isn’t much fun.”

Notice that last one. Amateurs have fun—both in practice and in performance. The proficient (notice I didn’t say professionals) do not. It’s all about approach. Do you want to have a good time or do you want to become good at what you’re doing?

The latter approach is about always improving—pushing ourselves just beyond what we can currently do. It avoids automaticity and actually changes our bodies and brains.

I can say unequivocally and experientially that I have found this to be the case. I became serious about writing fiction in the summer of 1994. It was then that I began to write daily, seek and receive feedback, study great writing—reading books about writing and reading lots of great novels—and though I witnessed improvement all along, it was after I crested the ten thousand hour and one million word mark that I experienced a quantum leap into a level of proficiency that was, to me and trusted others, apparent and recognizable.

Want to be great at something? Whether or not we are is far more in our control than most of us realize.

Here’s a challenge for you. Find someone who is consistently proficient, who is great at what they do, and examine what enabled them to reach their current level of performance. I guarantee, whether you find evidence of natural abilities or not, you will certainly find someone who is reaping the reward of years of investing, of working harder and longer and more intentionally and deliberately than anyone else.

There are no shortcuts.

The belief in genius, in prodigies, in “you have it, or you don’t” amounts to little more than an excuse for laziness.

You, me, and the sullen young man who inspired this piece, have an opportunity to be world-class, but are we willing to pay the price, put in the work, sacrifice a big chunk of our lives to achieve it?

Dedication to a decade of deliberate practice is the beginning. What are you waiting for? Get Colvin and Gladwell’s books and get busy.

The Sacred Journey

I went to see “Eat, Pray, Love,” not because I expected it to be a great movie, but because its subject—namely how to live optimally—has been a lifelong pursuit of mine.

I’m so very grateful for the gift of my life, and sincerely attempt to put the most into it and get the most out of it. Toward that end, I continually ask myself the following questions.

(I’m not saying Liz Gilbert, the protagonist of “Eat, Pray, Love,” asks the same questions, just that her quest may have led her to some of the same answers.)

Am I practicing love and kindness?

How do I obtain enlightenment?

What is the meaning of my life?

How do I truly savor every drop of juice from the sweet fruit of the tree of life?

Am I being mindful?

How awake am I? How aware? How alive?

Am I blindly following the culture I was born into or questioning everything in search of the truth?

Am I living justly and compassionately?

Am I making the world a better place by living unselfishly, extending myself for others, giving my gifts with joyous generosity?

I’m not saying I’ve figured out the best way to live—not even close—just that I’ve devoted myself to finding out the best way for me to live my life.

Liz Gilbert dedicated a year of her life to a similar pursuit. Here’s how the studio describes the film:

“Liz Gilbert (Julia Roberts) had everything a modern woman is supposed to dream of having — a husband, a house, a successful career — yet like so many others, she found herself lost, confused, and searching for what she really wanted in life. Newly divorced and at a crossroads, Gilbert steps out of her comfort zone, risking everything to change her life, embarking on a journey around the world that becomes a quest for self-discovery. In her travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eating in Italy; the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Bali. Based upon the bestselling memoir by Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love proves that there really is more than one way to let yourself go and see the world.”

“Eat, Pray, Love” is better than I expected it to be, and, as usual, Julia Roberts is resplendent. The writing and directing are good—save for the way too much of the film is lit with a soft, ethereal quality from above and behind its actors, the overblown rim light putting a halo-like aura around Julia that I found extremely distracting. And it follows her not matter where she is—in a theater, a darkened room, even walking down an unlit street at night in Italy.

Liz’s journey toward enlightenment, toward love, began because she’s lost her appetite for food and life and wanted to go some place where she could marvel at something.

She’s in a crisis—recently divorced, floundering, trapped on a treadmill of meaningless, unintentional existence.

Like so many of us, it takes a crisis to move and motivate her. But we don’t have to wait for crises to force us toward meaningful lives any more than we have to travel the world to find some place to marvel at something.

Right now people from all over the world are traveling to Italy, India, and Bali attempting to eat, pray, and love their way to happiness and fulfillment, but the problem isn’t our zip code. It’s us.

Liz traveled around the world to find that the kingdom of God was within her all along. To walk the path, the way (of enlightenment, fulfillment, and love) doesn’t require outward travel, but inward.

There’s nothing wrong with travel, with an outward journey that symbolizes our inner one, but it’s the smallest aspect, shortest distance, least important part of the true journey.

In the same way the best thing an education can do is to teach us how to be students for life, the best and only hope Liz has of a continuous life filled with meaningful eating, praying, and loving is if her journey caused her to be able to have the same experiences when she returned. If we can’t find something to marvel at every single day, the problem isn’t with the world or where we live, but with us and how we perceive.

And we don’t have to devote ourselves to a guru to become our best selves. Or, if we do, it needn’t be for long and we don’t need to have just one. And no matter how helpful or inspiring or transformational we find certain leaders, we must inevitably shoot our gurus and sprinkle ashes on our Buddhas.

Like inspiration that becomes doctrine and eventually dogma, teachers, counselors, gurus too soon become gods and our attachment to them ultimately leads to spiritual dependency and death.

Liz found what worked for her. You and I have to find what works for us. There are no rules. There is no one path, no one way to walk The Way.

Want to know the best approach to life? Ask anyone with a terminal disease. They’ll tell you. Cast aside what really doesn’t matter. Spend your few rare, precious, priceless moments on meaningful things of lasting value.

Liz tried new ways of living in an attempt to change her life—going to extremes and traveling the world. And it seems to have worked. But true, lasting change is about integration, about how we live every single day. It lasts because we’re making lifestyle changes that lead us back to our best, most original selves. Diets don’t work because they are faddish and temporary and don’t constitute a true change in the way we live. The same is true of spiritual fads or programs or the latest greatest teaching of the most popular guru or book or Oprah guest.

Lasting change is about integrating what really matters most into our lives.

Here’s what I attempt to (and fail to) do every day and what I recommend to you:

Be. Savor every second. Breathe deeply. Empty. Open heart and mind and belt to the wonderful, terrible grace-filled catastrophe of life. Live with abandon. Love with passion and without reservation. Search for God—within and without. Be kind. Be still. Be silent. Be with supportive, nurturing friends. Be alone. Give. Give. Give. Ask. Seek. Knock. Sing. Dance. Make every meal a celebration. Make every day an adventure. Think. Create. Have lots of sex. Dream. Play. Protect the weak and vulnerable. Speak the truth. Fight for justice. Stand up for the oppressed. Be creative. To mine own individual, idiosyncratic self be true.

Only when these things become a way of life—something we live every day, not only on certainly holy days or in certain exotic places—only when eating is praying and everything is love, will we be our best, deepest, most actualized selves and live our best, richest, most meaningful lives.

Perchance to Dream

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come.


For all we know—or think we do—we know very little about dreams. Of course, the truth is, we know very little about much of anything, but some things are harder to fake than others.

Dreams can be defined as a succession of images, sounds, or emotions the mind experiences during sleep, but that doesn’t even begin it.

Dreams are mystical and spiritual, ineffable and inexplicable, which is why I take issue with Freud’s claim in “The Interpretation of Dreams,” that he can “demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state.”

Dreams are mysteries. Any interpretation is at best only partially correct.

Dreams can be instructive and inspiring, but in the way all mysterious things (God, the universe, art, life, death) are—In subtle, lyrical, non-literal, largely metaphorical ways.

Dreams are also rich material for story. Fiction, whether on page or screen, is like a dream. My experience with writing fiction—particularly the novel—is that it is very much like entering a kind of dream state, and, I to varying degrees, remain in it until the novel is born.

In thinking about this column, it occurred to me that dreams play significant roles in three out of four of my most recent novels.

Dreams are the subject and the setting for acclaimed filmmaker, Christopher Nolan’s new movie, “Inception”—an original sci-fi actioner that travels around the globe and into the intimate and infinite world of dreams. Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a skilled thief, the absolute best in the dangerous art of extraction, stealing valuable secrets from deep within the subconscious during the dream state, when the mind is at its most vulnerable. Cobb's rare ability has made him a coveted player in this treacherous new world of corporate espionage, but it has also made him an international fugitive and cost him everything he has ever loved.

Now Cobb is being offered a chance at redemption. One last job could give him his life back but only if he can accomplish the impossible—inception. Instead of the perfect heist, Cobb and his team of specialists have to pull off the reverse: their task is not to steal an idea but to plant one. If they succeed, it could be the perfect crime. But no amount of careful planning or expertise can prepare the team for the dangerous enemy that seems to predict their every move—an enemy that only Cobb could have seen coming.

Though one of the most well-made and entertaining films of this disappointing summer at the cineplex, “Inception” was not as good as I wanted it to be.

Sure, it’s demonstrates a brilliant filmmaker at work. It’s as well constructed a movie as you’re likely to see. It’s interesting and exciting and intense, but it has no soul.

It’s visually stunning, intellectually engaging, but emotionally unfulfilling. A puzzle, a logicians labyrinth. Clever. Cold. Cerebral. I wanted to care for the characters—enjoy the movie on more than an intellectual level—but there was no heart, no warmth, no spirit.

And I wish “Inception” had been more dreamlike, more random and hazy and nonlinear. For all its talk about and delving into dreams, there’s very little in it that feels like anyone is actually dreaming. I felt it could really have used the hypnotic touch of a director like David Lynch. “Mulholland Drive” has far more of the dewy residue of dream state than does “Inception.”

Both times I watched “Inception,” I thought of another dream-like movie, “What Dreams May Come”—and though it’s more about the dreams that come when we’ve shuffled off this mortal coil, it makes a quite convincing case that those dreams are more like the ones we have in our beds at night or in our heads during the day than we realize.

Though I’ve seen “What Dreams May Come” several times, I decided to watch it again while writing this, and I discovered that it’s even better than I remembered. A lot better.

I had also forgotten how beautiful and extraordinary Annabella Sciorra is and what a tour de force her amazing performance is in this film. Watching her served to heighten how weak the poorly cast Ellen Page is in “Inception.”

Watch any scene in “What Dreams May Come” and you’ll find more true, convincing human emotion than in all of “Inception.”

“What Dreams May Come” is a gorgeous film, a work of art, filled with and about art. It’s magical and mystical and beautiful. In short, it’s a dream. It’s a stunning work of imagination about life and death, but most of all it’s about love and loss. It’s profound and says some interesting things about the world to come—something like “As below, so above,” we create our lives in the afterlife in the same way we do in this present life, that if something is true in our minds, it is true. As the person who wrote the phrase “what dreams may come” says, “Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

“What Dreams May Come” is about things dreams are made of—twins, soul mates, second chances, not giving up, winning when you lose and losing when you win. It’s filled with the things that fill dreams. It’s inspiring and inspiriting—and everything that “Inception” is not.
It’s not that “Inception” is bad. It’s not. It’s quite good, and as for well-crafted, thoughtful and thought-provoking entertainment in theaters right now, it nears the top of the list of limited choices. In fact, I recommend it.

I recommend both movies, but for very different reasons. If you want to see a high-quality timepiece at work, go see the Swiss watch-like “Inception.” Its precision and brilliance are beautiful to behold. But if you want to spend time with something truly timeless watch “What Dreams May Come,” and as you do, open your mind and heart and embrace the dream of life taking place in the mind of God.

Where Do Broken Hearts Go?

What do you do when your heart hurts?

As someone who attempts to live with a certain mindfulness, I try not to bypass a broken heart, try not to short-circuit the process no matter how painful, no matter how long. There’s much to be gained from sitting with the saturnine experiences of existence.

I’m not advocating wallowing or prolonging or being miserable one moment more than we need be, just that there is benefit in the sad, in the sorrowful, in the song of the thorn birds fluttering around inside of us.

As Siddhartha so rightly stated, life is suffering. Pain is part of being a healthy human. I live, therefore I feel. And in addition to our own pain—that caused by others and the self-inflicted variety—there’s the pain of others. Only the narcissistic feel only their own pain. Love, genuinely caring for an other, inevitably leads to pain. The more love we have, the more pain we have. He who loves ten has ten woes. He who loves fifty has fifty woes. The more capable of compassion we are, the more we will suffer. Compassion comes from two words that mean to “feel with.” Feeling what others feel leads to additional pain and suffering.

Whether we choose to open ourselves to others and to their pain, or focus on ourselves and the thousand natural shocks that our flesh is heir to, pain, suffering, broken hearts are inevitable.

When my heart hurts, as it does right now, I think and feel, reflect and write, read and meditate, turning to art and religion for guidance and healing. Occasionally, I turn to trusted friends and counselors, but mostly I experience my sadness in solitude. And in my aloneness, few things comfort, console, and give care as much as the right movie.

It’s true, books are better, but there’s something so immediate about movies. Like fast-acting medicine, an old familiar film provides nearly instant relief.

I’m not recommending simple escapism, though there’s certainly a place for that, but films that feel like old friends—available to us when old friends can’t be and without all the guilt and calories that accompany comfort food.

I’m sure you have your own medicinal movies, but here are a few films that get me through you might try, too.

No filmmaker makes me happier, cheers me up faster, than Richard Curtis. “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” and “Love Actually” are movies I watch and quote from so repeatedly it seems as if I have them on a continual loop.

When I need inspiration, to be reminded of the difference one person can make, I pull “It’s A Wonderful Life” and “Keys of the Kingdom” off my shelf—two films that, in numerous viewings, never fail to speak to something deep within me and make me cry like a little girl.

When I want to fall in love or be reminded of the possibilities of love—particularly for those whom it has seemed to pass by, I turn to “Before Sunset,” “Conversations with Other Women,” “Love Affair,” “Frankie&Johnny,” and “The Russia House.”

When I want to look at life from a different perspective, to see the world and love and relationships in a new way, Charlie Kaufman is what’s called for, in particular, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “Synecdoche, New York”—movies that are moving, thought-provoking, awe-inspiring, devastating.

And for all the above—for love, romance, inspiration, sacrifice, making a difference, and just getting carried away—nothing the doctor orders can compare with “Casablanca.”

If my broken heart wants not to feel unbroken, but commiserate with other broken hearts, I find “Brief Encounter” and “The End of the Affair” particularly appealing.

Sometimes, when I’m laid low by life or love or something far more random, what I need is to just be swept away, to get caught up, or take off on an adventure. When I do, I return to “The Last of the Mohicans,” Blade Runner,” “Spartan,” “Man on Fire,” “Déjà vu,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist,” “The Holiday,” and “Dan in Real Life.”

And if I just need to laugh, nothing helps me quite as much as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” “The Hangover,” and, of course, a Richard Curtis film—most of which could go in all of these categories.

There are so many other movies I could mention. This list is not meant to be comprehensive. These are just where my broken heart goes, the ones I keep in my medicine cabinet—my first aid kit for my in-case-of-emergency moments.

As you can see, among other things, I recommend movie therapy. Story gives meaning to our lives, and films provide a singular, immediate experience of story—art imitating life in narrative we can relate to and be inspired by. So the next time you’re feeling broken, remember my prescription. Take two movies and call me in the morning.

Kingdoms in Conflict

Leo Tolstoy said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.”

He wasn’t the first to say it.

After penning what many believe to be two of the best novels ever written (“Anna Karenina” and “War and Peace”), he spent his later life studying and writing about the Kingdom of God.

Jesus’ teachings, encapsulated in the “Sermon on the Mount,” became the foundation upon which Tolstoy attempted to build his life and legacy.

The Kingdom of God is within—not without. Not of institutions or empires, church or state, but of love.

It is not only opposite the world, but opposed to it—standing as an alternative, a current that is counter to culture and creed, dynasties and domination systems.

As such, the Kingdom of God functions differently than the Kingdom of the world. Those who live by it trust, share what they have, love everyone—even enemies—refuse to retaliate, fight greed and hate, inequality, and injustice. In stark contrast, the world, fueled by selfishness and greed, in largely controlled by money and power, manipulation and physical force, oppression and brutality, most often putting the might of the majority in power over the rights of the multitudes.

The kingdom that’s within rejects power, refuses to use physical force. Built on compassion and justice, it operates in freedom and love—which are virtually the same thing—making a priority of helping the poor, the oppressed, the least, the lowest, the marginalized, and disenfranchised.

In Tolstoy’s antiestablishment and antiauthoritarian “The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystical Religion but as a New Theory of Life,” he argues that all societies contain social systems of wealth and power based on the inequitable distribution of wealth where, even as governments and ideologies change, domination systems use the threat of force to protect institutional inequality. The powerful maintain their power because of systemic oppression, and under the threat of force and the allure of material desire, individuals committed to maintaining the status quo are actually instruments of their own domination.

Power corrupts.

Like the Roman Empire Jesus challenged or the Russian Empire Tolstoy railed against, our culture is corrupt. Greed has led to a domination system that, through brainwashing of state and church and family, leads most of us to walk around in a hypnotic state, faithful cogs in the very machine that oppresses us.

But as evil as injustice, inequity, oppression, and domination are, Tolstoy, like Gandhi and MLK, follow Jesus in his insistence that force can never be a part of the Kingdom of God, and strictly adheres to Jesus’ prohibition of responding to evil with evil. Freedom is love is right. Force is evil is wrong.

Tolstoy’s radical commitment to Jesus’ teaching, particularly his insistence on nonviolence and ending greed by the sharing of one’s possessions, led him to reject the ownership of private property and to sign away his copyrights to his works, which in turn caused an epic battle with his wife—the last year of which is dramatized in Michael Hoffman’s “The Last Station.”

After almost fifty years of marriage, the Countess Sofya (Helen Mirren), Leo Tolstoy’s (Christopher Plummer) devoted wife, passionate lover, muse and secretary—she’s copied out War and Peace six times…by hand!—suddenly finds her entire world turned upside down. In the name of his newly created religion, the great Russian novelist has renounced his noble title, his property and even his family in favor of poverty, vegetarianism and even celibacy—after she’s born him thirteen children!

When Sofya then discovers that Tolstoy’s trusted disciple, Chertkov (Paul Giamatti)—whom she despises—may have secretly convinced her husband to sign a new will, leaving the rights to his iconic novels to the Russian people rather than his own family, she is consumed by righteous outrage. This is the last straw. Using every bit of cunning, every trick of seduction in her considerable arsenal, she fights fiercely for what she believes is rightfully hers. The more extreme her behavior becomes, however, the more easily Chertkov is able to persuade Tolstoy of the damage she will do to his glorious legacy.

Into this minefield wanders Tolstoy’s worshipful new assistant, the young, gullible Valentin (James McAvoy). In no time, he becomes a pawn, first of the scheming Chertkov and then of the wounded, vengeful Sofya as each plots to undermine the other’s gains. Complicating Valentin’s life even further is the overwhelming passion he feels for the beautiful, spirited Masha (Kerry Condon), a free thinking adherent of Tolstoy’s new religion whose unconventional attitudes about sex and love both compel and confuse him. Infatuated with Tolstoy’s notions of ideal love, but mystified by the Tolstoys’ rich and turbulent marriage, Valentin is ill equipped to deal with the complications of love in the real world.

A tale of two romances, one beginning, one near its end, “The Last Station” is a complex, funny, rich and emotional story about the difficulty of living with love and the impossibility of living without it.

Kingdoms come into conflict in “The Last Station”—inside Tolstoy as much as without. Any attempt to live in allegiance to the kingdom within will inevitably lead to conflicts with other kingdoms—without and within.

Hoffman has made an exquisite film of relationships and rhetoric, of love—love of people, love of principles. It’s the story of spirit and flesh, of noble ideals and small-souled self-interest, all swirling around a gifted writer and thinker, a man attempting to live according to his convictions—no matter the cost.

Every element of the film works, but the directing and acting—particularly Plummer, Mirren, and Giamatti—are stunning.

Though only covering the last year of his life, “The Last Station” gives us a fascinating glimpse at Tolstoy and his struggles to follow Jesus.

Like Tolstoy, I attempt (and continually fail) to follow the true, simple, profound teachings of Jesus, to live according to the kingdom within, and, like him, this leads me to reject cultural status quo and the roles church and state, money and power, play in the domination system. I part company with him when it comes to celibacy, but he did, too, until late in life. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in my eighties (though I sincerely hope not). I also think there are ways to integrate the radical teachings of love and freedom, of nonattachment and nonviolence, in everyday life, to be countercultural within one’s own culture—as opposed to removing oneself completely from culture.

I recommend in addition to watching “The Last Station,” you also read “The Kingdom of God is Within You,” and in the process, search yourself, as Tolstoy did, for the Kingdom of God inside you.