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Sunbeams

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is screwy.

Joseph Campbell

The Grace Of Great Things

Reclaiming The Sacred In Knowing, Teaching, And Learning

Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings. In education especially, community connects us with what Rilke called “the grace of great things.” We are, in reality, in community with the genes and ecosystems of biology, the great questions of philosophy and theology, the archetypes of literature, the artifacts of anthropology, the materials of engineering, the logic of systems and management, the shapes and colors of art, the patterns of history, the elusive idea of justice under the law — we are in community with all these great things. Great teaching is about knowing and feeling that community, and then drawing your students into it.

Sunbeams

Some people think that doctors and nurses can put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Blowing It In Idaho

A flock of silent mallards skims low, and the first bats flutter out. In a moment the couple will disappear into the warm, glowing belly of the hotel, where they may or may not make love. So much depends on the man’s attentiveness, and so far he is blowing it. I know more than a little something about that myself.

One Hand Clapping

I studied Ram Dass’s spiritual odyssey as if it were a map to some mysterious continent whose existence I’d only recently discovered. A year earlier, I’d taken LSD for the first time; I, too, had experienced a radical shift in consciousness as I’d glimpsed my true self, and tasted the glory at the heart of creation.

Sunbeams

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Samuel Butler

Finding It

Self-Storage

Sunbeams

It’s never been my experience that men part with life any more readily at eighty than they do at eighteen.

Anthony Gilbert

October 1997

Let’s respect the heroes who live far from public sight: behind a battered desk in a legal-aid office; on a meditation cushion; in the kitchen at three in the morning, rocking a child who can’t sleep.