Meditations

It is a strange experience to be in a wilderness in the afternoon, where the bear scat is as big as miniature coke cans, and then be back in the…

My oldest sister’s daughter—the eldest granddaughter—got married the week before Christmas in the lakeside, snowy, storybook province of northwestern Michigan. No rotting institutions and degenerating traditions embody the sorry state…

A hundred meters upstream, a little girl jumps up and down and runs little circles in the shallows of the stream. In between these contented antics, she dashes back and…

There are many different forms of meditation, and often people speak of running or doing other activities as a form of meditation for them. But initiating truly meditative states is…

Sometimes one sentence is so pregnant with meaning and implication that one has to stop reading. Here’s just such a sentence, which I read today: “Homo sapiens was no longer…

A small woodland hawk skims above the surface of the creek, then swoops up and lands atop a tree upstream. The sky is opaque, with a high white cover, but…

I met Lamar shortly after returning to California in the 1980’s. Deciding to get my college degree at 30, I had landed at a small school in the geographical center…

A corrupt and decrepit religious institution has elected another septuagenarian, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, 76. He’s from Argentina and a Jesuit no less. Perhaps he will focus attention on the…