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The Lucy Syndrome

The inexorable pride that haunts me, the fever of gluttony, and lust that would forego God for an ecstatic moment are the gas, grease, and oil that lubricate this Hellbent vehicle. They are tears the sperm that race up the tube; they excite and terrify but they will never, never save me.

The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues

(Part III)

After leaving Warm Springs, I will have to learn the next steps on my own. I have no compadres about me to give me the benefit of their learning. I will, alone, have to build physical and emotional resources to deal with the real world.

Reluctant Resister

I had finally reached, within the secret recesses and labyrinths of this jail, the silent center and perfect still point of human suffering. Behind those thick steel doors, entombed in concrete, curled in a tight fetal position on a cold metal bed, lies the suffering body of Christ.

The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues

(Part II)

Paradise. Paradise of Meriwether County, Georgia. Warm Springs. Two support personnel for each patient. Campus of the gods. Food of humans — prepared to be eaten at civilized times.

The Rising Sun Neighborhood Newsletter

I think we should have international coming out day where we gather our assorted courage and tell a few friends or the world The Awful Thing and find out — they already knew and didn’t care, they didn’t know and can’t see what the problem is, they’re shocked but get over it and are bigger in a while . . . or, or, or it’s awful to them too and we lose a friend.

Gandhi’s Way To Peace

Most western students (I say most, not all), and interpreters of Mahatma Gandhi have understood him in a rather narrow sense. They have seen his non-violence, his Satyagraha and his pacifism in terms of war and resistance. They have ignored a very important section of his philosophy which is about the reconstruction of a peaceful society. War to him was only a by-product of our economic and political systems, a symptom of wrong relationships among human communities. There is no point in resisting war if we do not remove the causes of war.

All Men Are Brothers

Selections From The Writings Of Gandhi

I do not want to be reborn. But if I have to be reborn, I should be born an untouchable, so that I may share their sorrows, sufferings, and affronts levelled at them, in order that I may endeavour to free myself and them from that miserable condition.

Random Notes On Spiritual Life

 If the discipline is prayer, pray! If meditation, meditate! Be constant. Doing — over the seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years — has one singular and amazing advantage over thinking: for once there is the possibility that the student will know what he is talking about. 

The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues

(Part I)

They draw me into an arch so that they can run an eighteen-inch horse-needle in between the plates of my spine for an hour or so to get a copious sample of the cerebrospinal fluid. So the doctors can tell my family. What they know already. That I am very sick. That I might die.

We Do Only Be Drownded Now And Again

Excerpts From The Rising Sun Neighborhood

The only way I can make any sense of recent presidential elections is that the most vivid person wins, regardless of content, because too many of us have been dressing our lives in beiges and are suckers for a red tie and shiny shoes that look like relative strength.