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Luck Disguised As Ordinary Life

On the way back to the hotel, Martina whispered in a conspiratorial tone that her friend Carlos Castaneda was coming to join us for tea. “Don’t tell anyone. It’s just for us. He’s a bit finicky about who he hangs out with.”

Sunbeams

I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.

Grace Moore

So Familiar And Yet So Strange

First, there was the customer ahead of Simon in line disputing the price of a jumbo jar of sliced jalapeños. Then the senior who was low on cash and tried to pay on a credit card, invalidated three times.

Sunbeams

What used to be called liberal is now called radical, what used to be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate, and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.

Tony Kushner

Sunbeams

All the wrong people remember Vietnam. I think all the people who remember it should forget it, and all the people who forgot it should remember it.

Michael Herr

Getting Used To It

The Beat Goes On

During the Vietnam War I asked one of the wise men of the peace movement, a kind of renegade Jesuit, if there was any force on earth that could end our love affair with war. “Only education,” he replied. “There has to come a time when they beat the drum and no one marches.”

Trying To Be Human

Zen Talks From Cheri Huber

My understanding of what the Buddha taught is that there is a reason suffering happens, and that it is possible to end suffering. For me, the easiest way to understand this is to recognize how my suffering arises from wanting something other than what is.

Sunbeams

What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.

Henry David Thoreau

Sunbeams

Every morning the New York Times is out on the front step, and I wake up and get my tea and decide whether to meditate first or read the New York Times first. If the New York Times is first, by the time I’m to page four, I am already engaged in the pain and the suffering, the greed and the fear. If I meditate first and come into a kind of spacious awareness, I have a perspective that gives me some leverage so that I don’t just keep drowning in it. It doesn’t mean nonaction; it means that the action comes from a quieter space inside.

Ram Dass