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Spirituality
From Here To Eternity
William Richards On The Transformative Potential Of Psychedelics
I was outside of time. Awe, glory, and gratitude are the only words for what I experienced.
November 2017
Sunbeams
November 2017We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Weapons In The War For Human Kindness
An Interview With David Budbill
There are many different uses of language. There’s the politician’s use of language, which is too often an outright lie. There’s the diplomat’s use of language, which is carefully worded so as not to anger or offend, yet calculated to achieve the intended goal. The supreme diplomat these days is UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. And then there’s the poet’s use of language. Emily Dickinson said, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” I think she meant that the truth, like the sun, is too bright to look at directly. Allegory, for example, is a way of telling the truth but telling it slant. In my own poems, though, most of the time, I try to tell it blunt and straight.
February 2017
Every Reason To Stay
Eva Saulitis’s Life With Whales
I have to say, what kept me there was not the science but the place. I wanted to be there in a way that had purpose. I didn’t want to visit or go on long kayak trips. I wanted to spend my life in Prince William Sound. For five years I lived at a field camp for three or four months at a time. The work gave me a purpose for being there: a part to play in protecting the ecosystem.
January 2017
Sunbeams
April 2016Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry.
excerpted from
The Surgeon As Priest
I cannot see their hands joined in a correspondence that is exclusive, intimate, his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious — not of him, not of Yeshi Dhonden for his gift of beauty and holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that, touched so, received. And I know that I, who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one.
January 2016My Devils
One time when I was seven years old, my aunt placed her hands upon me and tried to drive out my devils. I was not aware that I had any resident devils and said so, hesitantly, as she was a firm woman. She said, You certainly do have devils, and they are beginning to manifest. I did not know what manifest meant but did not say so.
January 2016
The Mystic And The Warrior
Radical Priest Matthew Fox On Loving And Defending Our World
The mystic in us is the lover. The mystic says yes. But the prophet in us is the warrior, and the warrior says, “No, this is unjust. No, this is suffering that we can work to relieve.” That’s the rhythm of the mystic and the prophet, the lover and the warrior. It’s not enough to be one or the other.
July 2015
Golden Threads
Our family’s involvement with the Church of the Living Word — aka “the Walk” — began with plain white cassettes. At first just a few lay scattered around Mom’s tape player, but they proliferated fast, covering shelves and filling drawers, even spilling from the car’s glove compartment when I opened it.
July 2015
Houses Of The Spirit
When I asked my six-year-old son, Dev, why he wanted to go to church for the first time that Sunday morning, he gave perhaps the only answer that could have nudged me into folding my newspaper and moving toward some faith I’d never bothered with before. He wanted to go, he said, “to see if God’s there.”
July 2015
