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Selected Poems

A mourning dove calls: Why / do you grieve? This world, / I answer.

Sunbeams

I want to be with those who know secret things / or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, “I Am Too Alone”

Radar and Revelation

Jeffrey J. Kripal on Archiving the Impossible

I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen.

Eight Tenets

This morning I tell myself, Everything is possible—the first tenet of qigong, the Chinese practice where you stand or sit and start scooping energy out of the air like it’s invisible ice cream. Reaching out and scooping, pulling back and placing energy on your heart, energy that allows good things to happen in all situations. This makes me feel super ninja and ready to meet the day.

The Healer

He was riding the train to his teaching job when he heard about Skimmer’s bike accident in a post from another college friend. It was noon in Tokyo, where he was an English instructor; his conversation school opened in thirty minutes. Skimmer had been one of his closest friends in college. They’d lived on the same floor for two years and had shared an off-campus house with others for three years after that. Skimmer had started mountain biking their first semester in the house. Sometimes he would have accidents, and his blood would smear the bathtub while he dressed his wounds. But then he would clean, and when Skimmer cleaned, he scrubbed and wiped and penetrated each corner, calling upon a small orchestra of sprays and rags, brushes and solutions. It was like watching Leonard Bernstein scour a tub.

Sunbeams

In the beginning was the beat, and the beat was the rhythm of God, and the rhythm of God became the harmony of humanity.

Clarence Glover

Reason To Believe

Randall Sullivan on Faith and Evil

Cohen: Do you think part of that evil spirit is found in every human?

Sullivan: I don’t think we’re born with it, but we have receptors that can connect to it, and we decide how much attention we give it, how much we turn toward its allure.