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Sunbeams

Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts, and the scenery is falling apart.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A Phenomenology Of Panic

Part of the problem with panics, Gene taught me, is the very sense that there is a problem. This creates a bogus responsibility for either oneself or someone else to solve it. If the patient can’t solve it, he is not only panicking; he is a failure. If he passes the responsibility to a clinician, he loses power and gives up the right to direct his own life.

Coming Back To The World

Timothy Conway On Engaged Spirituality

There are two kinds of really powerful, transformative spirituality. One is mystical spirituality, or the full, inner awakening from egoism to transpersonal awareness. The other is engaged spirituality, working for the public good or collective welfare, out of a deep sense of solidarity with all sentient beings. The problems in the world today are so immense, grievous, and dire that we need both kinds of spirituality, not just an individual, inner mystical spirituality.

Louder Than Words

Starhawk On Street Activism And Global Justice

It’s always a good time to ask ourselves what kind of world we want to live in. There is a future clearly laid out for us in which decision-making power belongs to those who have the money, and their decisions will support short-term profit value, making every other human and natural value subordinate to it. We will have less and less freedom, less and less of the services we need to sustain life and community, less and less of all the things people really care about and love.

Webs Of Power

Notes From The Global Uprising

We have been blockading all day in a giant spider web: an intersection entirely surrounded by webs of yarn that effectively prevent movement into the street. The intersection is held by a cluster from Asheville, North Carolina, that includes many labor-union members. We are blockading arm in arm with the ecofeminist Teamsters. In front of the police barricade, a group of protesters are “locked down”: sitting in a line with their arms chained together.

Stronger Than Death

If, on a visit to St. Benedict’s Monastery in Colorado, you were to drive about a half mile beyond the main turnoff, there on your right you’d come upon a washed-out driveway leading to an abandoned ranch house known as the Stanley place.

Dances

We are supposed to be asleep in the van. Instead we are sitting up in the bed our mother has fashioned on the floor and peering out between the paisley curtains at three people splitting a joint. It’s Friday night, and the community-center parking lot is full. Inside, a band from Sebastopol is playing Country Joe and the Fish covers. My mother comes out every half hour to check on us, and we pretend to be asleep. She is due in another ten minutes.