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We Killed Them

We are in a sea of color. Three thousand athletes from all over California are assembled at Drake Field on the UCLA campus for the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. Jimmy is the shortest player on our team, so I hold his hand as waves of athletic teams move about us. Joey holds my other hand. Michael, Eddie and Audie walk ahead of us, arm in arm, like the Three Musketeers. Pride and friendship are on parade.

Tchad — A Memoir

Tchad, in the front seat, turned to me in the back, waved his arms expansively and yelled above the traffic noise, “Tell us again how your grandmother barks like a dog, Linne! Tell it again!”

Artists And Magicians

Within the intuition of magic is an inborn drive to always remain on the edge. The artmagician appears to be mad or, at least, very strange. He goes to the gas station or restaurant and eyes follow him. He is feared or admired; it matters little which. His passage leaves a backwash of affection.

Something Does Push The River

David Spangler On Community And Commitment

The Christ is the manifestation of a basketball passing through the table of our universe. It’s a multidimensional event which we are trying to grasp four-dimensionally. We would see it as history, as a succession of events. Which means that the event is still happening. It is not in history, it is history, it is still happening. We are in the midst of it at this moment. I don’t know just where we are along the basketball.

The Poor In Spirit, And The Rich

Book Review

Dr. Fischer is a dark God who grants us favors only at the cost of our humiliation, who eggs us on with snatches of happiness only in order to degrade us. He is a greedy God, as greedy as his creatures: he is greedy for our humiliation.

An Evening With Ram Dass

You’ve taken an incarnation that is absolutely perfect to work out your karma. I’ll tell you how form-fitted it is. It isn’t just some schlock, factory-ready garment. This thing is so tailor-made that every experience in your life — every single one of them, what you felt on the toilet this morning, every one of them — is designed within that game to awaken you, if you want to use it. You’re given an entire road map out.

Wrinkled Little Man With Sad Eyes

Book Review

The mature work of Somerset Maugham is nothing if not honest. It moves on the weight of his blunt, plain sentences, which he delivers to the reader like so many body blows.

One Hundred Years Of Solitude — An Appreciation

We forget, until a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude reminds us, that a metaphor can be a glimpse into the interconnectedness of things, and as such, a large new breath of possibility to our pallid imaginings of self.

And That’s The Way It Is?

For a while, several years ago, I stopped watching the TV news. This was no small thing. I was in the habit of watching all three networks, often at the same time, spinning the dial with the finesse of an accomplished musician running scales on his favorite instrument.

The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn Of A New Age

Steven Forrest On The Next 2,000 Years

We live in a cusp, a time that we can call the “crack between the ages.” Right now we could say we’re in an Aquarian energy field, but with Piscean structure, Piscean myths, Piscean traditions, so in a sense we live in two ages. In another sense we don’t live in any age at all. One has died and another is being born. There is more freedom in these cusp times than there can be at any other time.