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A Good Life

We were in the kitchen, listening to the radio — Norma preparing dinner, Mara studying for exams — when the bulletin came over the air. The United States had just gone to war with Iraq. Mara, not quite fifteen, looked up in astonishment. Norma put down her knife and wept.

Three Women

She was wearing ragged cutoffs and a faded short-sleeved blouse, and her legs and arms were deeply tanned. You could have broken them like pieces of kindling.

Heaven On Earth

A Conversation Between A Political Radical And A Spiritual Seeker

Radical: You talk about yoga, and meditation, and prayer, and the search for ultimate truth. But what is your spirituality in practice? Spiritual Seeker: You’re so angry. What kind of change will you create if you’re dominated by these feelings? Will the world you build be so different from the one we have now?

Homelessness

A huge beach umbrella, a Methodist church parking lot, a fire hydrant

Suffering As Grace

An Interview With Ram Dass

From the Buddhist point of view, we have five hindrances: lust and greed; hatred and ill will; sloth and torpor; agitation; and doubt. That’s who we are, so why is one surprised if there’s suffering? But when you look at it from the spiritual point of view, you see that suffering is grace, a gift given in order to awaken you.

Shyness

Picture days in grade school, summers on fire lookouts, Saturday afternoons at the movies

Sunbeams

We think that we must become acquisitive — though we call it by a better-sounding word. We call it evolution, growth, development, progress, and we say it is essential.

J. Krishnamurti

He Wears Black

I am a German man. That is clear. But I am born in the year 1955. Ten years after the war is over and so, I am having nothing to do with that war. I am part of the new people in Germany.

The Lives The Dead Have Given

Poems After Rumi