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Sunbeams

Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams.

Mary Ellen Kelly

Next To Godliness

The Story Behind Dr. Bronner’s Soap — An Interview With Ralph Bronner

A few times a month, I’m asked whether we’re a New Age religion or a cult. Well, we’re not, or if we are, we have no members. Our family is running a soap business based on Dad’s teachings. All he did is what any religious person does: he read the great works — the Torah, the Bible, Thomas Paine — and picked what he liked. His theology was a sort of cosmic soup.

After The Ecstasy, The Laundry

Bringing Spirituality Back Home

It is one thing to offer a multitude of prayers for the sick and the poor, or to undertake loving kindness and compassion meditations for thousands of sentient beings everywhere. It is another to bring these same practices to bear in our own family and our closest community.

By The Roadside

September 2000

The English language sighs. The politicians can’t keep their hands off her. They buy her clothes. They buy her jewelry. They can’t stop making promises. How weary she is, and the campaign has only just begun.

The Holy Virgin In Queens

Last Year, not long before I left New York, I went to Queens to see the Virgin Mary. I went with a girl named Catherine, whom I knew only slightly, though I saw her around all the time; we had a lot of friends in common. I guess you could say Catherine and I were both part of a particular group — queer girls in their early twenties, living in New York City.

Sunbeams

Eighty years old! No eyes left, no ears, no teeth, no legs, no wind! And when all is said and done, how astonishingly well one does without them!

Paul Claudel

The Force Of The Face

Baby Face/Death Mask. Right away, at birth, the infant no sooner delivered, breathing, and bathed, its face is studied for clues to character. It looks so fierce, so wisely old, so placid, so much like “your” side of the family. . . . And, at the end, quiescent and struggle-free on the deathbed, they used to come with the plaster to make a death mask. The custom, begun almost five thousand years ago in Egypt, would capture the essence of character in the features of the face.

Sunbeams

I remember a medicine man in Africa who said to me almost with tears in his eyes: “We have no dreams anymore since the British are in the country.” When I asked him why, he answered, “The District Commissioner knows everything.”

Carl Jung

Where The Buffalo Go

How Science Ignores The Living World — An Interview With Vine Deloria

I think the primary difference is that Indians experience and relate to a living universe, whereas Western people — especially scientists — reduce all things, living or not, to objects. The implications of this are immense. If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it. Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design.