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Wrong Turn

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake On How Science Lost Its Way

I suggest that morphogenetic fields work by imposing patterns on otherwise random or indeterminate activity. Morphogenetic fields are not fixed forever, but evolve. The fields of Afghan hounds and poodles have become different from those of their common ancestors, wolves. How are these fields inherited? I propose that they are transmitted from past members of the species through a kind of nonlocal resonance, which I call “morphic resonance.”

excerpted from
Walden

I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

Acts Of Kindness

An envelope with hand-drawn flowers, a heavy wool coat and scarf, a vintage Chevrolet Monte Carlo

If Only We Would Listen

Parker J. Palmer On What We Could Learn About Politics, Faith, And Each Other

There are people on the far Right and far Left who can’t join in a creative dialogue about our differences — say, the most radical 15 or 20 percent on either end. But that leaves 60 or 70 percent in the middle who could have that conversation, given the right conditions. And in a democracy, that’s more than enough to do business.

Confessions

Torn pants, a little pink toothbrush, a C-shaped scar

Sunbeams

Country things are the necessary root of our life — and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death.

Esther Meynell

The Camel

I grew up in a village in southern Lebanon a few years after World War II, the “Big War,” as we called it. In that place nothing came between us and the world we lived in, and in that world there was always blood, lots of it. We slaughtered the animals we ate.