RSS FEEDConnections
A quotation from the book Creators on Creating: “Myriad connections, though perhaps unseen, exist between all things. While I may jump in the air, I fall down again; and the sun energizes plants and they energize us; molecule after molecule is stacked up to make a tree, which is pulverized to make the paper for […]
The Ultimate, A Quotation
“…It is not that certain peoples such as the old Japanese believed that individual ‘spirits’ or ‘souls’ inhabited stones and trees, but that the One and Only Being, manifesting both simultaneously and successively through an indefinite multiplicity of states, spiritual, psychic, and physical, aroused their awe and received their reverence in and through one of […]
Through Love Alone
Recently I discovered that my 9th great grandmother was tortured as a witch in Europe during the Inquisition. This led me to reflect yet again on how violence is engendered by religious extremism of every type in every age. The news today is full of stories of ISIS and “radical Islam,” and, on other […]
Being Gentle With Myself
Have you noticed? Often “Tis the season to be jolly” is followed by the season of wintry gloom and depression, the time of being downcast, of being revisited in the still of the night by the sorrows and sadness of our past or of the world? I have. Between that annual recurrence of melancholy and […]
Naming the Essence
The following excerpt concerns a people and a place about which I personally know almost nothing, but about which I have long been deeply interested and to which, somehow, on a spiritual dimension, at least, I feel connected. The quote comes from a book given to me recently by a friend who feels, as I […]
To the Contemporary Bunkshooters
Excerpts from a poem by Carl Sandburg “You come along…tearing your shirt…yelling about Jesus. Where do you get that stuff? What do you know about Jesus? Jesus had a way of talking soft and outside of a few bankers and higher ups among the con men of Jeru- salem everybody liked to have this Jesus […]
Taking in the Good
A quote from Rick Hanson, Ph.D: “.. Recognize the value to yourself and others of taking in positive experiences. It is a good, a moral, a virtuous thing to soak in good experiences. Even from a spiritual perspective, positive emotional states support practice through freeing up attention, building confidence and faith in the path, and […]
Patriotism and Religion
On this Fourth of July weekend, I reread the words of James Madison, written in a letter to Dr. Jacob de la Motta and Mordecai M. Noah in 1820: “…Among the features peculiar to the political system of the United States is the perfect equality of rights which it secures to every religious sect. And […]
Fear and Reassurance
May we all, tormented in spirit in the face of life’s present mysterious tragedies, hearken now to the inner voices within ourselves that speak to us of a transcendent peace and beauty that can and does sustain us through life and death, reminding us of the precious nature of each moment in space and time […]
Love’s Calm
Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the UN in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, kept a journal, published posthumously as Markings. He was faced, personally and professionally, with so many calamities that I looked this morning at his published words for comfort and courage, prayerful as I am after the news of last night’s earthquake […]
