spirituality

  • A Season for Ghosts

    A Season for Ghosts

    I often think of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when I think about ghosts this time of year. December has always felt like the most haunted month to me. Not because it is frightening, but because it brings the past closer. Dickens understood that. He tapped into something deeply human when he wrapped a ghost story…

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  • It’s in the Bloodline, Honey

    A dream of my grandmother revealed a truth that lingers: we inherit more than DNA. We carry the stories, emotions, and unfinished dreams of those who came before us. It’s all in the bloodline.

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  • Every morning I go down to the onsen in our hotel and soak for about a half hour. It has become a ritual for me, not just relaxation but something deeper. The Japanese onsen is steeped in centuries of tradition. There is a right way and a wrong way, and before you go, you must…

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  • Still Standing

    There are times when I wish I could go back to the days before I saw the darkness for what it really is. Before I understood how deep it runs, not just through the world, but through people too. The difficulty comes when once you have seen that darkness, you cannot unsee it. You cannot…

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  • The Chosen

    My relationship with God is not a complicated one. I live on very even ground with Him. We have an understanding, a quiet agreement that I am who He made me to be. Sometimes I believe that being gay has actually made me one of His chosen. Think about it. You come into this world…

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  • Angels?

    What do I believe? That question has haunted me for years. Angels. Guiding beings. Protectors. Light. Love. The word itself carries a kind of warmth, does it not? But what if we have been looking at them all wrong? During the Screaming House haunting, something strange would happen. The phone would ring, and on the…

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  • To Outlive Them All

    Death itself has never been the thing that frightened me. What terrifies me is the thought of losing everyone I love before my own time comes. That fear has been stitched into me over the years, thread by thread, through loss after loss. When you are young, you believe there is time. You imagine decades…

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  • Nightmares are not fiction. They are truths that bleed through our dreams, warnings we cannot always name. Glow begins there, in the still hours of the night, where fear has no shape until it presses its weight on your chest. Sleep paralysis, shadow figures, the demon crouched at the edge of your bed. Science gives…

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  • I Am Not the Secret

    I am not the secret,though they tried to make me one—hiding truth behind closed doors,feeding silence instead of love,teaching bitterness as inheritance.I was the boy they blamed,the brother they resented,the son who stood in the shadows of lies. I am not the sin,though they laid it on my shoulders.I am not the weight of their…

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  • Seventeen years ago my book The Uninvited was released into the world. At the time, my son Elliot looked at me and asked a question that has stayed with me ever since: “Who would want to read about our lives?” It was honest, simple, and impossible for me to answer back then. What I did…

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