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Sunbeams

The Middle Ages hangs over history’s belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size forty-eight shorts forever.

Tom Robbins

Sunbeams

There comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to go — if there are no doors or windows — he walks through a wall.

Bernard Malamud

Love, Work, Hope

For the novelty of it, I had agreed to work construction for a day with my brother Neil. I was kneeling on a roof, driving a nail into a piece of plywood, but after each hit, the nail went crooked and fell out. I began to get discouraged. Neil, standing nearby, instructed me to “pound harder.” So I did, but I still couldn’t drive it straight. My shoulders collapsed, and I wriggled in babyish frustration. Neil took two steps toward me, kissed me directly below my right ear, and knocked the nail in with one swing. And I thought, I want a man like that.

Ursa Minor

Nobody could remember a time when there had been so many bears in the valley, not even the old-timers who had lived there all of their lives. It was early fall, and the weather was turning. We’d had the worst summer of fires in many years, and endured our ninth year of drought. In the high country of Idaho, the berry bushes were brown, and the streams had dried up. Hungry and facing the prospect of winter, the bears began moving down into the valleys.

Foot Soldier

The Long Walk For Justice And Peace — A Conversation With Satish Kumar

The central realization that pulled me away from monkhood was that there is no escaping from life; the spirit has to be practiced in the everyday world, and not outside of it. The world is beautiful — the earth, the land, the people — and you have to accept even pain and suffering as part of that beauty. That realization threw me into the social, political, economic, cultural arena. It convinced me that wholeness of life is paramount.

Dry Roots

The wheat is starting to turn, flashes of deep gold streaking through all that tall, waving green. Before we moved to Colorado, I used to think wheat grew golden yellow, like in all the photos I’d seen. I suspect most city folk think that. They don’t realize that wheat grows up green and living and then dies, and that’s when it becomes useful.

Incidents And Dreams

We ought to be glad for change. You want to tip your hat to anything that slits open the seams of your life, even just a sliver’s width, allowing for the possibility of minor rearrangement. You want to bow and curtsy, even if you cannot give the thing a name.

Sunbeams

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Payday

It’s summer, and I’m taking two women from a foundation that helps fund my work to see where the money is being spent, and if the money is being turned into productive, life-sustaining gardens.

In The Name Of Compassion

A Lawyer Fights Assisted Suicide — An Interview With Wesley J. Smith

A proponent of assisted suicide could be Moses, and it wouldn’t make assisted suicide right. That said, I think the motives of those promoting this agenda are mixed. I think there is a difference between the true believers in assisted suicide, who view it in an almost quasi-religious way, and people who support it because they believe it is the compassionate thing to do. The latter are merely misguided, in my opinion.