“Do you ever think about dying?” asked Barbie. I do. Do you? I'm on the eve of my 78th, luckily still alive. I think about dying, but not in a morose way. I stumbled into death at age 18 when I worked for a funeral home that also ran the community’s ambulance service. We’d take the big “S” off the side of the Oldsmobile hearse, put the bubble light on top, and clamp in the stretcher. Sometimes we’d deal with accidental or old age death;…
Pope Francis is a religious man in a way that I admire. His papal leadership and care are for the truly poor in this world and for the world's environment itself. That's being religious. For many, religion means believing in God (ever elusive in definition) as felt within or taught by various religious traditions. For me, religion means relating well with reality. The word religion comes from the old words religio and religare, basically meaning, "to bind back to the root and become whole again."…
While highly distracted with love and hope (I fell for someone – on my face!), I managed to read three good but very different books this month: "Atheist Manifesto," "Proof of Heaven," and "This is Your Brain on Music." Because I owe all six of my regular readers something by the first of the month (when an automatic reminder goes out to this site’s subscribers) and because the events of my love life and non-love life roused up similar concerns, I’ll review them here. After…
I’m partial in myself. I occupy only a bit of who I am, what I know. I can’t include It All. It’s too much. I occupy only a fraction of the person I am and could be. You are too. What did you have for breakfast? You probably weren’t thinking about it until I asked. Then you probably can remember. Do you really know what you want? Do you know how others see you? Do they know how you see yourself? These social partialities create…
Trump tweeted that "These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just indicated" him. I believe he wanted the word "indicted," because he just was for trying to hide the hush money he paid a porn star after having an "affair" with her. It's the least of his four legal challenges. He'll play the victim, projecting that others are the very Thugs and Monsters he's actively trying to inflict on our government and society. He'll use it and the images of the violent insurrection of January…
(This is the third article I've published in Maya's and her daughter Radhaa's series, Awakening Starseeds, Volumes 1-3. I appreciate the honor of being included in their book series (which is available on Amazon). I wanted to punch Rajneesh in the nose, pull back my fist, and ask him a question: “If we are not the body, it and the world all being the illusion of maya, would you mind if I punch you in the nose again?” I didn’t, of course. I had nothing…
Avatar takes us on an exciting ride that changes our sense of self, scale, and loyalty. We soar up into tree branches and down into the roots as if we’re insects in the forest. Who are we in the larger communities of life? We think of Pandora’s Box as releasing all the troubles of the world, but that’s a perversion of the original myth. In the pre-patriarchal version, Pandora’s Box contained the goods of a natural world. We were similarly tricked out of Eden. We…
Americans barely rescued our country and democracy in the mid-term election. Over $16 billion dollars was spent, much of it channeled through “dark money” organizations. The Supreme Court has blessed this secrecy, declaring corporations are “persons” and money is their “free speech.” About half of that was spent on federal elections, half on state and local. In some locales, the tv and social media were inundated with gobs of ads, none identifying who paid what for their annoying drone. Here are a couple of reports…
Remember the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause”? James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo played three distraught teens, alienated from their families, caught up in teenage toughness, resulting in a tragic accident. Those were the days when a switchblade knife at school was considered dangerously wrong. “Blackboard Jungle” that year also showed the disturbing trend, amplified much later in 1972 by “Clockwork Orange,” which portended purposeless violence. The Rebel Without a Cause movie was titled after the psychiatrist Robert Lindner’s 1944 book of the…
