Featured Selections
From the Archives
Displaced
Graham Pruss On Why More People Are Living In Cars And RVs
To insist that people who have a mobile shelter are “homeless” not only denies that their shelter can be a home; it also has the potential to deny their humanity, because it insists that they are incapable of making a home.
September 2021
Our Rag-Bone Hearts
Richard was introduced to mental institutions when insulin and shock treatments were in their experimental heyday. Inappropriate and excessive use of these treatments dealt him the blow ensuring that he would never again plead for his home or protest his lot.
September 1993The Homeless
I was just rousted off the floor of Grand Central Station by two cops, one of each race. It didn’t occur to me to say, “But I’m waiting for the train to Poughkeepsie!”
November 1988One True Life
Walking to the neighborhood store, / my small, beautiful dog / straining at his red leash, and I / in my big winter jacket / against an April freeze and this / light battering of rain — / a young man approaches us, can / of beer and a Lotto / ticket in his hand.
September 1997A Pale Blue Dot
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great, enveloping cosmic dark.
October 2019
Man, Videtan Flora, And The Berendora Of Equatorial Videt
“Dangling in his face was a single stem of the graceful foliage of the Eighteenth Species. He saw then that he could not hold back, and yet must risk doing terrible damage to the crowning floral creation of the Universe. He crept forward in an agony of joy and terror.”
February 1979The Good Heavens
The sky is perfect tonight. The flawless close to a false Spring day in mid-February — an odd day with chirping birds, open windows, shirtless basketball and soft outdoor conversation before supper.
March 1977Early Space Travel
I take my son into the dusk, / under trees still heavy / with the season’s first rain. / We watch as the entire / face of the moon darkens, / like a child with a bad cold.
January 2006excerpted from
The Doors Of Perception
According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But insofar as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
July 2010Signs Of Intelligent Life
Carl Safina’s Evidence That Other Animals Think And Feel
And each year we kill for food billions of animals we raise as prisoners and whose lives are often more terrible than their deaths. Even if we do continue eating animals, we could do much better by them and raise them more humanely. The way people treat animals affects the way they treat people: if you brutalize animals, you are probably hardhearted toward humans, too.
August 2016
