Author: tomstellawebsite

“So – true story – I’m walking down Jefferson Blvd. and this old, long gray-haired hippie dude…leaps out of the bushes and grabs me by the lapels…and he shouts at me, “You won! You won, my friend! You won!”… I said “What did I win?” The old man cackled “Hah! Don’t you know?! You won … Continue reading Cosmic Lottery

Curve your straight Widen your narrow Don’t crouch in a gully Sample the peaks Down in the dumps your doom is secure Resuscitate your ardor Heat up your pizzazz Put roller skates on your pussy feet Welcome the peril of passionate dismay      Have you ever felt that your life is small? Have you allowed … Continue reading Curve Your Straight

“In an essay published shortly before his death, Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote of the dangers of closed tribes as the “great new problem of mankind:” We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and … Continue reading World House

“Where do we go when we sleep? A third of our life is lived underground, and deep down inside us a stream that will rise now and then to the surface, trailing visions into our waking. Yet what if that stream had been watering us all the days of our life and we never knew … Continue reading Life Within Life

“What the Living Do is addressed to her brother, weeks after his death. It begins by detailing a particular morning, one which a person…could easily dismiss as a bad day. The kitchen sink is clogged, and Drano isn’t helping. The dishes are piling up. It’s cold outside, but the heat in the apartment is cranked … Continue reading What the Living Do

“The anonymous author of the following quote turns the traditional image of spirituality on its head: “God and the angels will hold you accountable for all the joys you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.” Instead of the solemn face of the saint or the figure of a renunciate lost in contemplation, he … Continue reading Ode to Joy

The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get … Continue reading Being Wholly Alive

“You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear. You’ve got to be taught from year to year. It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear. You’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made. And people whose skin is … Continue reading You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught

“The addictions that afflict many of us as we meander through life are false gods that we worship in order to fill an inner void, an emptiness that, if we embraced it, could make way for the Presence for which we long. A subtle example of a void-filling false god is the busyness with which … Continue reading Avoiding the Void

“I am in love with every church and mosque and temple and any kind of shrine because I know it is there that people say the different names of the one God.” These beautifully inclusive words are the work of Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet and spiritual teacher. They were as radical in his … Continue reading The One God