Browse Topics

Sunbeams

At the moment you are most in awe of all there is about life that you don’t understand, you are closer to understanding it all than at any other time.

Jane Wagner

When The Hills Flow With Wine

Vera piled the thin, silvery black fish on my plate. Their beady little fish eyes kept staring at me. As a distraction, and for revenge, and because I was hungry, I focused on the technique of eating them: first pinch the head between my finger and thumb; then take two precise bites — one on each side — and a few nibbles to steal all the meat from each.

What Was Hidden: Looking Deeper Into Christianity

An Interview With Richard Smoley

The inner Christian path, as I understand it, involves walking a fine line between the two extremes. You face all your inner issues rigorously and impartially; you want to see everything there is inside the teeming ocean of the psyche. But — and this is an important but — you are not identified with it. At the back of your mind there must always be an awareness that you are not your “passions” (to use the traditional Christian term), that there is something in you that is awake and alive and, incidentally, immortal. This is the true “I,” the pure consciousness, the “light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” It sees everything in you impartially and objectively — but also with profound compassion.

A Partial Inventory Of The Great Mistakes I Have Made

Burning the teakettle to a crisp because the whistle was broken and I forgot I’d turned it on.

Sunbeams

An unrectified case of injustice has a terrible way of lingering, restlessly, in the social atmosphere like an unfinished equation.

Mary McCarthy

The Botany Of Desire

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive. It’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.

Sunbeams

When, at some point in our lives, we meet a real tragedy — which could happen to any one of us — we can react in two ways. Obviously, we can lose hope, let ourselves slip into discouragement, into alcohol, drugs, and unending sadness. Or else we can wake ourselves up, discover in ourselves an energy that was hidden there, and act with more clarity, more force.

The Dalai Lama