A Mindful Life

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake — not merely conscious, but wide awake. Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who say he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does [...]

Twenty minutes ago I returned from a “turn and burn” trip to Houston with my fiancé to visit his grandmother before we move. It was a spontaneous visit which we squeezed into our schedule, because no matter how much we must do to prepare for our transition, we could not imagine leaving Texas without seeing [...]

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. –Philo of Alexandria

These stones harbor tales of peasant and saintly toil in service of kings. “A Walk in Assisi” by Lisa Russo ©2003 /ephotograph.com

I found a fascinating article on the history of the Olympics that describes how divergent the modern games are from the ancient ones in terms of philosophy. With the modern games, “the relentless emphasis on human-interest drama, the uncomfortable efforts to maintain the thin pretense that politics are absent, the ceaseless rhetoric of pure athleticism, [...]

Life is a sculptor having etched its history on more than memory. “Paris in Newark” by John Buckley ©2003 /ephotograph.com

I grew up in central New York. Ten years ago when I was so ready to leave, I referred to it as “a great place to be from.” I couldn’t wait to shake the dust (or rather, slush) from my shoes. Over time, however, the distance helped me to see what is special about upstate [...]

This is brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I followed a link from Siona’s blog and am glad I did. I can’t seem to figure out what to do with my head. It is too small to carry the right sort of luggage and dangerously prone to spills and injuries. I was thinking I might rent it out [...]

There was a woman on the train yesterday talking on her cell phone. Loudly. I thought about all the times in the day when people were annoying. The car that moved too slow out of the parking space or wouldn’t let us into the lane. The woman in the grocery store, blocking the lane. We [...]

We need collective intelligence, a coherent integration of our diversity that is greater than any or all of us could generate separately, just as an orchestra is greater than the sum of its instruments. We need a new kind of collectivity that does not repress individuality, diversity and creativity but that, instead, allows us to [...]