Consciousness

Moon Jellies

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Some nights I dive into the sound / and let the waters have me. / I’ve felt the brush of a jelly arm— / they never really sting. It’s the glimpse / of that phantom-thing gliding beside me.

The Danish

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:00:00 -0500

Then I felt a small admiration for the Man With The Danish, who hoped to give away excess food rather than throw it in the trash. Maybe I should have accepted the Danish, although I didn’t want it. By turning it down resentfully, I might have discouraged him from ever offering food to a stranger again. But there’s no time to think when someone thrusts a sudden dessert in your face.

The Cat Who Woke Me Up

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

The hierarchy that places humans above cats has broken down. I know, in a way I once didn’t, that cats and dogs and birds and bees and every living creature are conscious in a way that’s too hard for most of us to acknowledge. We’re all a bunch of narcissists who imagine that no life-form is quite as appealing as this one we call human. We’re unable to share the stage unless the animals are the supporting players.

Sunbeams

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I want to be with those who know secret things / or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “I Am Too Alone”

Radar and Revelation

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 12:00:00 -0400

I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen.

Nectar

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 12:00:00 -0500

It was an old tradition he had once told her about: When there was a death in the household, the beekeeper would go out to tell the bees about it. The thought was that, if the bees were not told, they would abscond. They were members of the family. Their feelings would be hurt if they were overlooked.

So he was doing it. Telling them. Romantic fool.

Old Souls

Sat, 30 Nov 2024 12:00:00 -0500

Askey: This is perhaps an ontological question, but do you think James Huston became James Leininger, or is there some other entity—some consciousness, some soul—that was once James Huston and is now James Leininger?

Tucker: The latter much more than the former, I think. We can only speculate, but to my mind there may well be this larger self that has different lifetimes. It’s a core that continues, though the people it inhabits are different. I use the analogy of actors in movies. When you see Jimmy Stewart in a movie, it’s undeniably Jimmy Stewart, and yet he can play very different characters.

August at Forty-Three

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

For six years we’ve taken no precautions / and my body has made no / third baby, nor have we plotted / to create another life, content / to let nature do what it would

Better Yet

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -0400

Wanting to go beyond where I’ve already been: / Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing to do? / Then why would I rather go all the way back to the day / before I was born?

Aubade with Calf

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0400

So early the mist remains hammocked / between hills. My hand / palms a calf’s muzzle. // We are two beings / drawn together by instinct. By this definition, / I have found the one.

Drug Experiences

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 05:00:00 -0500

Mushrooms in the desert, pot on a family vacation, black hash on a nuclear submarine

Timely Question

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:05:00 -0500

How can time / be / rushing / by

Under The Surface

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

Cohen: This summer, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine caused controversy by disclosing a conversation with an AI called LaMDA, or “Language Model for Dialog Applications.” The conversation seemed to suggest this AI system had some awareness of itself, but the idea was dismissed by a number of people who work with such systems.

Güzeldere: It’s interesting that Google fired the guy who published that conversation. . . . People are saying, “Oh, it’s just a hack,” but it’s a very impressive hack. I think it will become a product that will be accepted by consumers.

The Enchanted Loom

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

The brain’s genius is its gift for reflection. . . . It takes many forms: our finding similarities among seemingly unrelated things, wadding up worries into tangled balls of obsession difficult to pierce even with the spike of logic, painting elaborate status or romance fantasies in which we star, picturing ourselves elsewhere and elsewhen.

Sunbeams

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 05:00:00 -0500

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe-inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. . . . These atoms now form a conglomerate — your brain — that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder.

V.S. Ramachandran

Sunbeams

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 05:00:00 -0500

A memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.

Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Sunbeams

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500

Silence is something that comes naturally when you are watching, when you are watching without motive, without any kind of demand, just to watch, and see the beauty of a single star in the sky, or to watch a single tree in a field, or to watch your wife or husband, or whatever you watch. To watch with a great silence and space. Then in that watching, in that alertness, there is something that is beyond words, beyond all measure.

J. Krishnamurti

Reading From The Desert Fathers At The Laundromat

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 05:00:00 -0500

A certain brother went to Abbot Moses and asked him for a good word. And the elder said to him: Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.

Mr. X

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 04:00:00 -0400

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Sunbeams

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 04:00:00 -0400

I dreamed a few years back that I was in a supermarket checking out when I had the stark and luminous and devastating realization — in that clear way, not that oh yeah way — that my life would end. I wept in line watching people go by with their carts, watching the cashier move items over the scanner, feeling such an absolute love for this life. And the mundane fact of buying groceries with other people whom I do not know, like all the banalities, would be no more so soon.

Ross Gay

When Living Is A Protest

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 16:00:00 -0400

My work is an attempt to show what it means to live in the struggle in places like South Carolina and Mississippi, and to document protests from Ferguson, Missouri, to New York City. I want to show the faces of those whose lives are spent in protest.

Musings

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 -0400

A stink bug perches on the bristles of my toothbrush. I know more about ventilators than I should. This morning’s coﬀee tastes luxuriously of earth. As I run through the forest, pileated woodpeckers hammer and cackle from above. I’ve got an ache in the ball of my foot. Some things never give up.

Not So Different After All

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 -0400

With the coronavirus we have another interesting issue: how we eat wildlife. Ecologists and conservationists have been saying for fifty years that we shouldn’t be eating everything on the planet.

Recipe For Strawberry Bliss

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Learn the word ennui. Resolve to do something meaningful with your life. Do something selfish and stupid instead. Go to prison.

Intimacy With Fear

Sun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 -0400

If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

Sunbeams

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Iris Murdoch

November 2017

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Featuring Pico Iyer, Starhawk, Sister Joan Chittister, Sparrow, Sy Safransky, and more.

From Here To Eternity

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 -0400

I was outside of time. Awe, glory, and gratitude are the only words for what I experienced.

Hooked

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 -0400

As I said, maintenance treatment cuts the death rate for opioid addiction in half, which is better than any other method that’s been studied. If you went to a cancer center and weren’t even offered the treatment that reduced your risk of death the most, you would have grounds for a malpractice case. Yet most residential addiction-treatment centers do not offer maintenance treatment and, in fact, oppose it, saying it’s not “real” recovery.

The Hogs, The Sow, The Wind

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Once there were two hogs and a sow who lived in a sturdy pen outside an old man’s hut. Then the old man died. That morning, no one brought food to the pen; the next morning, no one brought food to the pen. By evening the animals were panicked and ravenous, the bottom of the trough licked smooth as tile.