Meditations

The Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January of 2015 seemed localized and remote. The Bataclan massacre in November 2015 felt indiscriminate but still over there. However the depravity of…

The reason Barack Obama’s presidency has failed to bring unity to America was on the stage with him at the memorial for the murdered policemen in Dallas yesterday. And it…

Still a young man, he spent 9 years in a Japanese monastery. With shaved head and monk’s dress he looks the part. But from the start of the conversation he…

There’s a story about a woman being herded off the train at Auschwitz after enduring conditions unfit for the cattle previously transported in the same cars. Stepping onto the platform,…

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of natural selection. He wrote within a decade of the “Origin of Species” that the mystery of consciousness was proof that…

Letting thoughts and emotions arise, watching them intently without interference, the mind and heart quiet and clear. Time ends, and a deepening clarity ensues.

The ancient Romans had terms for a duality that persists to this day. They referred to ”vita contemplativa” versus ”vita activa” — the contemplative life vs. the active life.

A flock of small birds lands in the shallows, and a few begin furiously beating their wings in the water. More join in, and suddenly there are a dozen birds…