Varigated leaves, Maine 2009 We’re off for a few days in Vermont and Western Massachusetts with our Jack’s Place gang of friends. Jack’s Place is a house in the western corner of Vermont that a group of us are building together. At the helm of this project, emotionally and architecturally, is my favorite pied piper […]
Wisdom
Dune Dwelling
Sand storm on the Sands of Forvie (Photo: Martyn Gorman) Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this […]
Tidal Flow
In her conversation with Bill Moyers, Buddhist writer and nun Pema Chödrön talks about going into an extended retreat: I felt like I was in Kansas, and Oz was outside the door. You know, it’s like sensory deprivation. But, gradually, what begins to happen is that you sink so deeply into what life has been […]
A Knack for Navigating
Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God, was recently reviewed in the New York Times by Ross Douthat. Armstrong is a prolific writer whose energy to explore, explain and probe the human proclivity to religious belief is enthusiastically optimistic and beguiling expansive. (You can hear and see Armstrong speaking at TED.) As a Christian […]
Flow as a State of Being
Lava flowing into the sea on the Big Island, Hawaii, 1999 My friend Andrew’s weekly Sunday epistles have had a thread running through them over the last few weeks that speaks directly to my current state of mind. Maybe it is just a stage in the growing older business. I have come to think of […]
Letting Go
The point here is to take life in all its rich variety just as it is, with its ten thousand opposites, and to go along with whatever circumstances require, embracing things after their own inclination or according to chance, letting things be rather than getting in their way, and thus allowing each and every thing, […]
Directionals
Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge Massachusetts Yesterday a group of us gathered at the Blue Spruce Knoll at Mt. Auburn cemetery, the burial site of Bonnie Horne. Bonnie died in January, and she carefully chose that spot as the place where she wanted her name engraved in stone. As was her deeply methodical and thorough nature, […]
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Not Giving Over
Hindu altar, Kanchipuram India, 2008 Blue Arabesque, by Patricia Hampl, is a book-long meditation and memoir that starts with her deep and sudden connection to a painting by Matisse hanging in the Chicago Art Institute. Writing not as an artist but as a thoughtful wisdom seeker, Hampl describes a conversation she has with a 60 […]
Silence’s Non-Narrative
Isle of Skye, 1999 A respectfully reverent review of Sarah Maitland’s latest book, A Book of Silence, appeared in the Sunday Times Book Review. Written by Dominique Browning, the review and book both speak to many of the aspects of silence that I have written about here in earlier posts. It is something I think […]
Letting the Window Open
Christ’s troubled sleep from Milton’s ‘Paradise Regained’, Book IV lines 401-25, c.1816-18, by William Blake Once again I am moved to share an excerpt from my friend Andrew’s Sunday epistle. Armed with a piercing intellect and a PhD in literature, he often crafts entrances into Blake or Milton or Donne that I would not be […]