I recently finished George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In it, he takes seven short stories by famous Russian authors and talks about what works in them—what’s going on at a deeper level than a cursory read might reveal and why he can’t stop reading them himself. He intersperses this with discussions of his realizations as a human being and a writer. I loved it, but it’s taken me […]
2020 was not my most prolific year in terms of writing, but there is one piece that shines for me that I would like to share with you. It is the review I wrote for Mari Perron’s latest book, Mirari: The Way of the Marys. This book is about many things, but in particular it is about the power of the divine feminine and the potential within us to receive and birth the New. When […]
A number of elements drew me to Linda’s Mission-Possible Blog Challenge this year, but the first was the Louise Hayes desk calendar image she posted that read, “I chose to come to this planet, and I am delighted to be here.” The image included the eyes of a fox peering playfully over the top of a log. Something about that just cracked me up. It’s certainly not what we’ve been feeling of late—it’s not the […]
A quality of wholeheartedness is peace. There is a knowing of Creation’s completeness. We sense the unchanging center on which all things depend, and know it as our own center, too, as beings. We know it as the center of the bluebird on the branch, the center of a field covered with snow, the center of the Himalayan mountains, the center of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the center of the sun. When we are wholehearted, […]
The desire to write manifests as follows: a warmth in my chest accompanied by the sense of possibility, and the awareness something wants to be said, though I don’t know what it is. Last night I discovered and read an e-mail exchange between Sam Harris and Noam Chomsky that was published a few years ago. I’d been listening to some of Sam’s podcasts lately, and discovered the two men’s correspondence. I’m not expert on either […]
Writing fiction well is intractably difficult. You begin with maybe one or two bricks at the ready, stand facing an unruly forest that is neither for nor against you, but possesses all the density and might of any previously uncontested wilderness, and you are armed only with the vague feeling that a Taj Mahal-like structure of beauty and possibility is alive inside you. There really is no way to know where to place the first […]
What do you think the future will be like, Hafiz? I was thinking about fusion-powered hovercrafts and molecular sequencing technologies that could produce cheeseburgers from a teaspoon of good dirt. Redrawn political borders, bullet trains that crossed the ocean, and ways to download skills and information directly into your brain. I was thinking about teleportation and glass condominiums floating in the clouds. Something you drank that allowed your body to look whatever age you desired. […]
It is in my response to the world that I discover the thoughts most active within me, and it is quite often a humbling experience. The movement stretches and pulls and teases to the surface residual uncertainties and doubt. I have taken in reams and reams of information over the years intended to set me (and all of us) free, which my Undersecretary of Actual Motivations has taken under advisement, and accepted with a begrudging […]
Power is a word that evokes a strange spectrum of thought forms and connotations, reactions and prejudices. I think this is largely because the power we are most familiar with is the type that involves a victim and an oppressor. We view power as the ability to cause events to occur despite the competing will of another. That is our definition of power– a definition that makes perfect sense in the minds of the separate […]
Several posts I read this week raised a similar question about the New: what would it look like to you? What would it feel like? Who would we be? I wrote in one response that it seemed to me we would trust one another and all that is around us— meaning the heart of the world itself—in a very deep way. Then I went out and lived the type of week that made my musings […]
Embracing Forever 