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Spirituality
Houses Of The Spirit
When I asked my six-year-old son, Dev, why he wanted to go to church for the first time that Sunday morning, he gave perhaps the only answer that could have nudged me into folding my newspaper and moving toward some faith I’d never bothered with before. He wanted to go, he said, “to see if God’s there.”
July 2015
Lost In Thought
Most people spend their entire life imprisoned within the confines of their own thoughts. They never go beyond a narrow, mind-made, personalized sense of self that is conditioned by the past.
May 2015April 2015
I’m looking at today’s impossibly long to-do list. To accomplish everything on it will take more than twenty-four hours. To not accomplish everything will leave me ill-prepared to leave town tomorrow.
April 2015Miracle Cures!
I first became interested in alternative health practices as a teenager, when I began practicing yoga. I was also a drug user. My father thought this was a contradiction, but I said they both were about feeling good. When I took speed, it was easier to get into difficult yoga positions — although I didn’t have the patience to hold them for very long.
December 2014Sunbeams
November 2014What should young people do with their lives today? . . . The most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.
High Times: A Tribute to Stephen Gaskin
excerpted from
Monday Night Class
Sixties icon and self-styled “nonviolent social revolutionary” Stephen Gaskin died this past July at the age of seventy-nine. Gaskin was a prominent figure on the countercultural scene in San Francisco in the late sixties and went on to found the long-running intentional community the Farm, which is still thriving in rural Tennessee.
November 2014
The Unbreakable Thread
Here’s part of what I love about spirit threads: words that once inflicted only pain can become a heart wound, which then becomes both guiding scar and guiding star, transforming a perceived enemy into a genuine, if accidental, teacher. “Faith can move mountains,” that seminarian in the hospital said. “If you pray for your brother hard enough, with a pure enough heart, you can save his life.” Those words taught me via pain that, as writer Anne Lamott has it, “The opposite of faith is not doubt: it is certainty.”
November 2014
Beyond Belief
The first instruction was “Find a quiet place.” I went to Inwood Park and seated myself on a large rock, legs crossed, eyes closed. Immediately an airplane flew overhead. I stood up, walked a hundred yards deeper into the park, sat beside a tree, and again closed my eyes. This time I heard traffic from the Henry Hudson Parkway. Over and over I sat down, each time encountering a new distraction. Defeated, I walked home.
September 2014
excerpted from
The Practice Of The Wild
The pathless world of wild nature is a surpassing school and those who have lived through her can be tough and funny teachers.
August 2014
