Browse Topics

Forgetting

On the nineteenth of April 1989, one of the huge gun turrets on the battleship Iowa blew up, killing the sailors who were manning it. Debate about responsibility for the explosion continued long afterward, but lost in the emotion of the tragedy was a curious aspect of the story.

Limiting The Future

An Interview With David Ehrenfeld

Our new false god is the idea that we can order the future. It’s a secular messianic view of a world in which there will be no death, no sickness, no stupidity — a world we will have totally ordered by the force of our own intellects and technology.

Rats

In the seventies, over a period of five years, I killed approximately two thousand rats. That’s four hundred rats per year, a little over a rat a day.

The Reach Of The Mind

An Interview With Larry Dossey

What really knocked my socks off was a study that I first found out about in 1987. It showed that people in coronary-care units who were prayed for did a lot better than people who weren’t.

The Sentient Garden

The more I learn about my garden, the less objective I feel about it. Now that I can rattle off the Latin names and vital statistics of so many of my landscape plants, you might think I would regard them as botanical specimens, each possessed of a unique genetic recipe and species-specific traits. Call me sentimental: I think of them as friends.

Mr. Handyperson

A house is a remarkable multipurpose system made to provide shelter from heat and cold, security from a wide range of wild animals both primeval and contemporary, privacy, refuge, an investment, a statement, a hobby.

Sunbeams

You are sitting on the earth, and you realize that this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth. You are there — fully, personally, genuinely.

Chögyam Trungpa

When A Tree Falls In The Forest

An Interview With John Seed

Let me give an example of the scale of the destruction that’s going on. We know that the amount of solar energy necessary to sustain the hydrological cycle in the Amazon jungle — the energy necessary to lift that water into the atmosphere — is equivalent to the energy put out by two thousand hydrogen bombs a day. The vegetation that grows there captures that much energy. It creates a huge heat engine that drives the winds of the world, those winds that the ancient mariners knew, and the same winds that deliver moisture regularly and predictably to North America and to Europe. Those winds don’t simply exist — they’re continuously being created and maintained by large biological systems. The Amazon is one of the vital organs of the living planet.

Ejaculation

Trains, Planes, And Godhead

When I was in my teens and early twenties, I’d sometimes run out to meet the Burlington Northern trains as they made their slow progress through the Colorado town of Fort Collins.