Melting-Pot Dharma has been in a simmering phase as I took a long road trip over the Christmas holiday and now prepare for my seven-day retreat with Lama Surya Das. While on a break from daily blogging, I wanted to post something for the new year, always a time for reflection. But what to post? So much can be said this year about the world around us and the world within us.

The answer came from a young man’s cookie fortune and an old woman’s blue tattoo.

Many of you know that my son Thomas, 29, died seven months ago when he fell from his skateboard going down a steep hill in Charlottesville, Virginia, on his way home from drinking with friends. He was self-assured enough to ignore his friends’ pleas to share a taxi home, and to tackle that hill again, which had injured him badly once before. Behind…