A Mindful Life

You’ve seen here more photos and fewer words, including my own, because I’m deeply ensconced in the world of J.K. Rowling. In the past week I’ve caught up by blazing through books 4 and 5, and I am now a third of the way through book 6. I feel a bit as though I’ve been [...]

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.
–Brother Lawrence, The [...]

Where there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.
–Dorthea Lange

What newspaper do you read?

The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.
USA Today is read by [...]

It struck me as odd and sad that man could for centuries have so effortlessly graced the landscape with structures that seemed made for it — little arched bridges and stone farmhouses, churches, windmills, winding roads, hedgerows — and now appeared quite unable to do anything to the countryside that wasn’t like a slap across [...]

I went swimming today. Not in the gorgeous pool pictured below, mind you; that’s one of the Hearst Castle swimming pools — the Neptune Pool — and believe me, they keep an eagle eye on every tourist. No touching allowed. I hadn’t been swimming in years. Among the numerous pools in Santa Clara, the city [...]

According to the article linked below, on any given Sunday women outnumber men 61% to 49% at Christian services.
Murrow, a 1983 Baylor University graduate and author of “Why Men Hate Going to Church,” contends that the modern church is too chatty, too touchy-feely and full of hokey rituals that don’t affirm a guy’s manhood. In [...]

There is this curiously durable myth that European trains are wonderfully swift and smooth and a dream to travel on. The trains in Europe are in fact often tediously slow, and for the most part the railways persist in the antiquated system of dividing the carriages into compartments. I used to think this was rather [...]

With a heat wave gripping the nation, please remember: