These short reflections and insights range in length from twitter-length to short essays. They’re free, so what’ve you got to lose but a few moments?
A nation rose up from the ashes of the Holocaust, founded upon the ideal of freedom. Its people sought escape from centuries of oppression, to become a bastion of democracy, a forum for the exchange of ideas, and a place for multicultural expression.
Yet in its founding, there was a problem: there were others living on […]
Everyone has a role. I’ve spent most of life feeling like I didn’t belong. I’ve never really felt as if I had a place in the world. I feel at home on the earth, trolling the bellies of its canyons and clinging to the shoulders of its mountains, trekking out along the fingers of land […]
a few of the Needles
I live near the mountains, yet I prefer the desert. There’s a feeling that the desert gives. What would the Chinese say about my chi, my energy, the energy to which I’m drawn?
Canyonlands covers over 500 square miles of desert. Since trees grow there – mostly pinion and juniper […]
“…nature strives for adequacy, not perfection.”
Catch me, if you can
Life is to be lived, rather than perfected. I’ve spent a good deal of my life not trying to do certain things — take certain risks — because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do them perfectly. But nature strives for adequacy, […]
Though our experience of God changes throughout our lives, God itself is changeless. Although our understanding of God varies from culture to culture, evolving over time, the ‘substance’ of what God is never varies, and never evolves. Therefore, it is we who evolve, not God. And since we are a part of God – the […]
I’ll make a promise to you – I won’t try to improve you, to tell you that you need this from out there, or that you need to get rid of that from inside yourself. I’ll simply let you know what you’ve been hiding from by telling you what I hide from. It’s simply this: […]
There’s a thin line between madness and mysticism. In her tome, Mysticism, Evelyn Underhill describes the kind of temperament you often find in so-called mystics, a term you should probably shoot me for using. But we have to call ’em something, don’t we? Those who see over the horizon, who hear a voice in the […]
People wonder when there will be world peace, as if peace between nations is something that they can only wonder about, and not choose. Others see the path through peaceful protest, political organization, or violent demonstration. Maybe we won’t have world peace until each of us experiences personal peace. And maybe we won’t experience personal […]
The day I learned that I was a spiritual being trying to have a human experience, and not a human being trying to have a spiritual experience, I felt completely liberated, and free to mess up, probably for the first time since I’d shit my diapers. Before I became aware that I was fully entitled […]
Arkansas in Autumn
You can glide all day through the Ozarks and not hit a mall until Branson. I wind through oaken national forest on routes that switchback like true mountain roads even though they rise only 30 feet here, dip just 20 feet there. I don’t reach higher elevation until the Boston Highlands, […]