Nineteen eighty-four. What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn't have to do anything; we didn't lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its …
… and then there are the moments where, surprised, you find that the fingers loosen of their own accord; you no longer struggle to make something happen, nor struggle against struggling, but allow the events of your life to be the agent of release. Tonight, I passed some time with Tevye, the village milkman: Tevye, …
Such colors of an August afternoon. First, the shades of wedded green, from the backlit leaves and their lapped and shadowed neighbors, to the heavy hip-high grass, to the mosses of the rock garden; the ruffled ears of rhubarb and dense and barbed raspberry thickets; the high architecture of island elms and the near-black …
the door I return to
and must pass through
The crickets are loud outside my window, because outside my window, the grass is high. Life, in fact, in terms both general and specific, has got a lead on me, and the kind of maintenance my neighbors would like to see in my yard and which they cannot see and would not see within my …
Many Buddhist traditions share a specific practice for opening the eyes, opening the eyes of the heart. If you follow the path of enlightenment that Gautama Buddha walked, one who wishes to be free of entangling thoughts and desires — desire for the next and better car, the other better house, a different and better …
Balance must be struck between mind-numbing labor and lack of information, and mind-numbing frivolity with so much information it becomes meaningless.
There are some writings to which you are close enough, in historical moment and the nuance of language, that each word falls like a spark on your skin, an electric current to the wire of your life. Others are foreign even in translation, even after the attempt to make them current or accessible to a …
What we repeat becomes our center, that's sure. So when the wind is kicking up spray — when the movement of the air is really howling round you — we return to what we have repeated, what has become our rote. If it is made of wood, you will likely float; if it is a …
Was the phrase "to harp on" really coined by Shakespeare — Still harping on, my daughter? — or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public? Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the …
In our naturally egocentric way, we consider our senses channels of information that bring the world to us. We scan the horizon to identify threat or opportunity, we read; we listen to what is hidden or to what is spoken, what is sung; we are drawn to scents and repelled from odors, and we delight …
The language of touch is one where two stories are spoken together, and two energies which by nature are completely distinct from one another, move toward and recognize themselves