thoughts on life

Contemplatives usually want nothing to do with political activism, and activists usually want nothing to do with the contemplative life.

In her famous poem, “The brain is wider than the sky,” Emily Dickinson provides a powerful counter to the premises and presumptions of neuroscience. We would do well to consider…

The dam is breaking. There’s a phrase with two diametrically opposite meanings. In the negative sense, nearly 200,000 people locally were given less than an hour to evacuate their homes,…

Is the “arc of the moral universe” an illusion, or does “it bend toward justice” as Martin Luther King famously said, and Barack Obama maintained to his last day in…

The hillsides and banks of the streams are at their greenest now, just before spring in the Central Valley. A few trees are already in bloom, and the first smells…

Of all the outrages President Trump (I’ll never get used to that phrase) has already committed, the one that made the media-government complex apoplectic was when he derisively spoke the…

I’ve had the gift/curse of being able to see the near future (one or two years out) with visceral (not intellectual) certainty. Each time I’ve asked: If you know something…

Scientists now speak of the ‘Anthropocene Age’—the domination of the earth by man. It’s meant to be scientifically neutral term, as if a sentient species rapidly warming the atmosphere, depleting…