A Mindful Life

The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in [...]

Ah, the joys of traveling west to east. My body clock ticks along on Pacific time and while my mind attempts vainly to convince it otherwise, the old bod thinks it’s only 11 p.m. (a perky hour for a night owl). The wee hours loom. We arise at 6:30 to head for Olean, New York, [...]

My mother collects cobalt blue glass. Afternoon light + blue glass = stunning color.

Violence as a way of achieving justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks [...]

From my parents’ garden to their kitchen windowsill. There’s nothing like the taste of juicy, fresh-picked tomatoes.

People talk about sudden enlightenment, a sudden glimpse, satori and all kinds of other spiritual attainments. But those things require the conditions for you to pull yourself together. You need to be in the right frame of work, so to speak, and frame of mind to experience such a thing. So-called sudden enlightenment needs enough [...]

Recently I was contacted by Tim Spalding, developer of a new web interface for book cataloging called LibraryThing. I checked it out. What a creative idea! Just the thing for us librarian souls. It extracts data from the Library of Congress catalog. You can share your catalog or keep it private. And there’s a widget [...]

Why should we all use our creative power and write or paint or play music, or whatever it tells us to do? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth [...]

Mediocre in its simple signification I do not despise at all. And one certainly does not rise above that mark by despising what is mediocre. In my opinion one must begin by at least having some respect for the mediocre and know that it already means something, and that it is only reached through great [...]