I slept soundly enough last night. The news late Friday was of the passing of Supreme Court Judge, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg’s death is a momentous event, a breaking away of the keystone if you will, of a liberal (humane) democratic society as we have known it, as imperfect as it has been. …
The Socrates Café met earlier this week. Seven or eight of us began by discussing the challenges of listening mindfully, carefully to what someone of a different culture has to say. Listening well is quite difficult. A member of our group asserted that we Caucasian Americans are accustomed to speaking, to the expectation that…
Why Buddhism? We began several sessions to consider concepts entailed in Buddhism; not easy or comfortable for Americans who are natural pragmatists. Habits of thinking by categorizing, labeling experience is our default. Buddhist thought is a bid to move in another direction: reality as seamless, metaphysical monism. There is no purity or pollution, birth…
I have the website for The Leo bookmarked. The Leo is an independent, “alternative” newspaper published in Louisville, Kentucky. The editorial slant is unapologetic and progressive. The coverage of culture and local happenings is extensive and well written. I’ve visited Louisville a number of times and find the town on the Ohio river stimulating. …
Waking this morning there is drizzle outside. Weather extremes are devastating, and I am thankful, the proportion of sunlit days and to those with rain seems normal here so far. Too much heat and vegetation becomes fuel. Too much water, and flooding is the consequence. Technology, or to say it more plainly, the application…
57 In every healthy society, three mutually conditioning physiological types separate out and gravitate in different directions, each one having its own hygiene, its own area of work, its own feelings of perfection and field of mastery. Nature, …, separates out predominantly spiritual people from people characterized by muscular and temperamental strength from a…
Sitting under the maple tree, in front of the old Kane County courthouse built in 1892, it has the architectural look and feel of another time. Many that constructed the edifice remembered the War Between the States, and likely served in the Grand Army of the Republic. That explains the impressive sculpture, imposing, on…
Is it not interesting how we label time? A week ago I made the mistake of assuming it was the Labor Day weekend — a week early. I arrived at that conclusion despite evidence to the contrary. The joke was on me. Emotionally, my internal reality began to anticipate the three day weekend,– and…
I have completed the preface of a book, AGNOTOLOGY [The Making & Unmaking of Ignorance], edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger. The subject is “ignorance,” the history and the function of ignorance. I was intrigued to select this book because there is current an outbreak of studied, deliberate ignorance, ignorance which is…
The Socrates Café group met last night. As with the protocol for the last few sessions, a Go-To-Meeting video link was used. There were six images of participants, in a double line across the screen. For many reasons a digital representation of a human being lacks the vibrancy of physical presence. We are at…
