Browse Sections

Zen Mud

I’d planned to arrive in Japan with practically no social resources. I had some money, and my pack was heavy, but I hadn’t bothered to learn Japanese. I wanted to see what would happen. I arrived shaggy, hot, dizzy, and alone.

Confederacy Of Dunces

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

The new dumbness — the non-thought of received ideas — is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it’s really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a “cleansing” so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.

Trains, Planes, And Godhead

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I’d sometimes run out to meet the Burlington Northern trains as they made their slow progress through the Colorado town of Fort Collins.

Disappearances

My father died on a July day in Phoenix. When he was found, his temperature was 108. The medical examiner’s certificate listed the cause of death as hyperthermia.

Looking At Trees

The pressing issue for us Westerners, the famously alienated, is that our relationship to the world is that of master to slave. We think we’ve solved slavery in the human realm by turning iron shackles into low paychecks. But the shackles on nature grow tighter. In Brazil, a chain stretched between two Caterpillar tractors mows down forests.

To Invent Fire

I am much too concerned with the actual earth and what walks on it to spend my small time here seeking to define such abstractions as capitalism and socialism, and broader still, society and country.

Listening To My Father

He sat in there re-reading his Marx and Engels, cocooned in a shell, seemingly at peace. Then came the symptoms: a problem holding his knife and fork; a slight slur of speech. The diagnosis was Lou Gehrig’s disease. His life was ending soon.

A Summer Of Mowing Lawns

“Murine, is that you?” they’d call from behind the six-foot stockade fence that separated my yard from theirs. I’d come around the fence and see Herbert smiling and Wilda holding a plant. Wilda did most of the talking.

The Prayer Of The Body II

Compassionate Self-Care

A string of conflicted and limiting constructs, beliefs, and ideas has so dominated our awareness that it seems as if those ideas are real and nothing else exists. If we can dislodge and dismantle those disguised thought patterns, we can return our attention to the beauty and innocence of our life here.

The Prayer Of The Body

The Work Of Stephen R. Schwartz

By persistently asking where a feeling is being experienced, he helps distinguish between what is actually occurring in the body and the conditioning, the descriptions, the self-defeating ideas carried by the mind.