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Cosmic Mysteries, Cosmic Hype

A Hard Look At The New Age

There is no “new age,” or every age is a “new age.” Every randomly defined period of history is (of course) “new” when it is happening; yet all periods of history are subject to the eternal return of events and meanings. If we try to name the features by which observers declare a present new age, we find only some of the oldest and most conservative human activities: millennialism, the sacred earth, channeling and mediumship, communication with nonhuman entities, ritual participation in food and medicine, faith healing, and shamanism. These were also hallmarks of the so-called Sixties revival, a new age which was partially eclipsed by the materialism of the late Seventies.

Plain And Simple: A Journey To The Amish

I had always devalued Hestia, the peaceful goddess of the hearth. I thought poor, dull Hestia, the ugly duckling goddess, was stuck by the hearth, while my favorites, Athena and Artemis, were out there in the world, slaying dragons. But when I learned that the Latin word for hearth is focus, something clicked.

Scavenger’s Run

In Guangzhou, China, I once saw two men row through the muddy waters of the Pearl River to pick up floating leaves of cabbage. Now, a few years later, that’s what I do: make the scavenger’s run.

Flying

We keep trying to find out. We look at the present and wonder about the past, about how we got here. It’s a question much asked; most people don’t think it’s possible to answer. But the answer is simple. It was Father.

A New World

Heritage Clay

Her fingers caressed her statue. She pressed her thumbs into the woman’s forehead. Her beloved clay was soft and cool and oily. Her mother had willed her the clay. Heritage clay. Ninety years old. “It will mold your life,” her mother had said. Now Dorothy’s life threatened the clay. Her hand was too heavy.

Roads

Learning To Walk

For half a year now, summer to winter, I have been walking-in-place. I do not use any form of motorized transportation. I walk or bicycle everywhere.

The Emshock Letters

The quality and depth of the exchange between us was near the deepest, most basic level of my being. Before me stood a being in which existed, in a universal sense, the most extreme opposite to everything I had known or defined as light, happiness, pleasure, tenderness, compassion, love, goodness and well-being.

Red Dawn Over Tweetsie

When I saw “Red Dawn,” I realized that a private and relatively innocent part of my adolescence had become tribalized on a mass scale, and from that fact flowed a palpable undercurrent of menace that had never been there for us.