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Stones Of Light

An Interview With David Freidel

One of the wonderful dimensions of shamanism for me is its unleashing of the imagination, the intuition, and the emotion of a person, rather than allowing the banality of the material world to overwhelm one’s life. Making the life experience conform to the imagination is a great thing, and it’s something I would like to see our society pursue actively. Instead of simply consuming fantasy, we should generate fantasy, generate alternative understandings.

Ceremony At Chews Ridge

We gathered in the Round House, a covered amphitheater dug into a hill, and sat on earthen benches. Four huge tree trunks in the middle of the room supported the wooden beams of the roof, which, like a tepee, was open in the center to the sky. Beneath the opening burned a large ceremonial fire.

From Yale To Jail

For no reason I can explain, I began to discover how little it matters where you are or what anyone does to you. I was sure that what I had done to get put in the hole was right, and somehow the longer I was there the better I felt.

Selected Poems

Sunbeams

The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.

Henry Miller

Selected Poems

At Seven

My own experience was going from grace to more grace. I felt only the love. All the other — the sin, the penitence, the being out of grace — was something my mother tacked on. That could never take root in me. The experience I’d had was so much more real and marvelous than anything I was supposed to believe.

A Brutal Sadness

Capital Punishment And The Politics Of Vengeance

Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. The execution ended fourteen years of legal wrangling over Harris’s fate, capped by four overnight stays of execution.

The Truth

Sunbeams

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

Helen Keller