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 […]
Wisdom
Inviting Silence
Once again Henri Nouwen has verbalized insights that resonate with me. I’ve never read any of the wise man’s books, but he keeps bobbing to the surface. My friend Nicole sent me quotes by him while she was completing her masters in theology. My favorite online wisdom guide, Whiskey River, has also provided some wonderful […]
A Call for the Imagination
Artist, writer, creativity coach and friend Nadine Boughton sent this message to several of us yesterday. Her insights touch into the delicate corner turning that happens every August. It is as if the seasons give us a gentle nudge since what is to come is inevitable and sublime, especially here in New England. Her photograph […]
Lean Out a Window
Just Thinking Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window. No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held for awhile. Some dove somewhere. Been on probation most of my life. And the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments count for a lot – peace, you know. Let the bucket of […]
Going In, Going Out
I’ve been in a deep relationship for months now with Lewis Hyde’s rich and fragrant book, Trickster Makes the World. Yes, fragrant. That’s how it feels to be enraptured by this amazing volume in all its lush, verdant and seductive power. While it can be approached with the traditional “start at the beginning and read […]
Leaky Margins
What Kafka had to be so clear and simple about was that nothing is clear and simple. On his death bed he said of a vase of flowers that they were like him: simultaneously alive and dead. All demarcations are shimmeringly blurred. Some powerful sets of opposites absolutely do not, as Heraclitus said, cooperate. They […]
Real + Imagined
And then the kicker is this: in passing from the real to the imagined, in following that trail, you learn that both sides have a little of the other in each, that there are elements of the imagined inside your experience of the “real” world – rock, bone, wood, ice – and elements of the […]
That Damned Underbelly
Portrait of Francis Bacon I have posted two separate reviews on Slow Painting of the Francis Bacon show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one by Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine, and one by Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe. Both touch on Bacon’s deeply troubled personal life, in particular his experience of […]
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Not the Pipeline, Just the Mule
I find it humbling that my opinion-generating, perpetual judging machine of a mind gets called out over and over again. My assumptions become hardened into fact more rapidly than is healthy for someone who professes to have the “open mind” approach to life. I’m guilty as charged. But the one nice thing about being guilty […]
- Uncategorized
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Report from the North
It’s hard to not be cynical when the talking heads announce that the US economy is “officially” in a recession and has been since December 2007. The absurdity of not being able to name what everybody knew until a year after the fact is one more piece of what feels like the cold-blooded machinations of […]