“Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts…
Spent a troubled night, awakening at intervals. Dreams are unaccountable. The recurring dream included several lyric lines from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne”. Not an unpleasant dream for me, I like the song. The alarm sounded at 6AM. A few minutes later, hardly awake, I heard from NPR that Trump’s son-in-law is angling for a role…
Nicolaus Copernicus surmised that the earth rotated around in sun in about 1514, and no one killed him for thinking that. He lived another twenty-nine years and died at the age of seventy. Throughout those final twenty-nine years, his revolutionary description of outer space mostly seemed an unprovable thought experiment that had the ancillary…
Yes, it’s a long tune, at 5 minutes. Did you notice the organ track, the musical pattern that opens and runs the entire length of the piece? Townsend was influenced by the philosophy of Meher Baba, Inayat Kahn, and composer Terry Riley. Townsend sought to replicate a theory of reality as harmonious, with the…
Some years ago I spent a few days by the Columbia River Gorge in Washington state. In the course of the hiking expeditions, two things came to mind over and over. The immense beauty of the surroundings was indescribable. The physical sensation of hazard, of the lethal consequences of a lapse in judgment, was…
Those who know me well, have no need to ask me which of the candidates for president that I favor. I’ve voted already,–the deed is done. Nothing more is left for me to do but wait. The reason for my choice is singular, simple. Here is a paragraph from Letter no. 7 from Rainer…
Only fools imagine that freedom means getting what one happens to desire. Real freedom begins with obedience to a higher influence—a higher, finer energy within oneself. What is higher in yourself? That way of thinking about the question is the beginning of the answer—because it involves a real idea which has been handed down…
…..if it worries and torments you to think of your childhood, and of that simplicity and quiet, because you cannot believe any more in God.…then what justifies you in missing him, who never was? Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final…
I am a North Carolinian, who immigrated to Chicago and adapted to life in one of the world’s great cities. Yet, the South has a place in my heart. Every visit to Louisville, Kentucky feels like home coming. Louisville is located on the Ohio River, a trade route since the West was settled in…
The road from Chicago to Louisville can seem longer than the five and a half hour drive the journey is supposed to take. Especially if you happen to run into a time-killing-slow-crawl traffic jam in the Chicago metro area. We’d been on the road for a while and were just past Indianapolis. Our joints…
