Meditations

For many years I’ve asked, what will it take to change the disastrous course of humankind? Clearly an explosion of insight is required. Just as clearly, no single group of…

A woodpecker lands across the stream shortly after I arrive. I’ve never seen one drinking at the water’s edge before. Something about the late afternoon light, the rippling water, the…

There’s an old Jimmy Stewart western, “Winchester 73” (one of his best), during which he and his sidekick are riding through hostile Indian territory on a moonlit night. Suddenly they’re…

The ancient debate between order and freedom seems to have been won by the proponents of personal freedom. But just as the old order of social conservatives and traditional religious…

How can a single, beautifully written sentence affect one’s entire being? Early this morning, as the sun rose, a line from Hamlet stopped me in my tracks. The beauty of…

Western philosophy, like Western civilization, is in crisis. What Plato called “the highest music” has been reduced to a discordant echo of science. Pouring salt in the wound, Stephen Hawking…

A girl of about 9 slowly makes her way downstream from ‘the beach,’ a small spit of sand in the park at the adjacent site. Carrying a walking stick she…

It’s late afternoon, and the light has changed in the canyon overlooking the gorge. The cliffs above suddenly appear sharper, and the huge vertical slabs of volcanic rock below seem…