Not long ago, when advising some friends who were about to start a garden, I told them to plant a state-of-the-art garden, meaning not a technologically complex one, but rather one in accord with the best knowledge we have of what constitutes excellence in a home garden. This can be expressed on the smallest levels [...]
“My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.” – Carl Jung
An old paperback I possess advertises its author thus: “Doctor and scientist, visionary and thinker, Carl Jung ranks with Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud as one of the great minds of the twentieth century.” I [...]
I was struck by the diocese of New York removing from the Easter Vigil the reading of Abraham sacrificing Isaac; presumably because the story scandalizes nice good people who want religion to look hunky-dory and sweet. But obviously, if God cannot work through horror and crime and sin and cruelty then He can’t be terribly [...]
“At times I feel as if I am spread out over the landscape and inside things, and am myself living in every tree, in the plashing of the waves, in the clouds and the animals that come and go, in the procession of the seasons… I have done without electricity, and tend the fireplace and [...]
This is the summer where I’ll be experimenting with getting much closer to nature - growing and gathering much more of my own food, and in general finding ways to do things without any monetary intermediary. I’m still very far from this ideal - dandelion salads and blueberry and apple picking has been the extent [...]
Is it not amazing that lying, deceit, fraud - whatever you want to call it - is not listed among the Catholic Church’s traditional Seven Deadly Sins? And here we see it still cannot shake a scandal whose deeper meaning is obvious: an utterly insufficient commitment to truth, truth at any cost, truth even if [...]
You’re off toward the edge of the bell curve when you tell strangers about your life and they say you remind them of anti-money crusaders living in caves. So it happened to me on Saturday night, when I was told to investigate a Moab man who calls himself Suelo (article in the link). I am [...]
The Deeper Meaning of Parenting.
07-May-10One of the questions that has most been with me the past two years is this: If I had a son or daughter, would I have anything to really teach them? Would I have gathered from my years on earth some kind of life-wisdom to pass on to them? Or would all my knowledge be [...]