After dinner the other night, a friend who’d recounted the rather impressive incompetence of the powers-that-be at his workplace said that he tried not to think about how messed up things are in the larger world beyond his 9 to 5, because when he got in touch with all that could go wrong, it terrified …
It all comes down to this: no matter how you parse it—art, politics, spirit, planet; body, mind, heart, and soul—the realms that are reckoned separate in the official version of our current reality are in truth a unity, and recognizing that is the path to wholeness. When we violate—ignore, deny, falsify—the absolute indivisibility of our …
If you stick around long enough writing books and essays and giving talks, people come to you for advice. Very often, the requests I get turn on choices between alternate futures. Graduating students, youngish artists and activists, members of an older generation considering “encore” careers or avocations—sometimes, people seek me out for advice on what …
It’s been one of those times when the pace of events—both interior and exterior—accelerates almost beyond reckoning. Granted, these days I get much of my news from “The Daily Show,” but still: Inauguration! Republican vote-rigging! Somalia! Egypt! I had a birthday with all the attendant thrill and agony, met a bunch of deadlines, and—big news …
I had a conversation last week with someone who gave up making films to start a business he hopes will earn enough money to finance major social-change organizing projects. He condemned progressives for their illusions, saying they that think if they’ve watched a hard-hitting film, they’ve done something, but really, “they’ve done nada. The most …
One feature of the history of ideas is a persistent belief in progress that isn’t disrupted by learning that trendy ideas often turn out to be as flawed as the silliest old ones. Part of the problem has got to be a deficit of reality-testing: how often do you go back to reality-check your expectations, …
These are tender times. The usual end-of-the-year retrospective ache has been amplified in the aftermath of so many storms, inner and outer. It’s often hard to know whether an ambient mood is the aggregate of personal response to the brokenness we are perceiving in world events or the opposite: a projection of personal angst onto …
Of this I have no doubt: the U.S. urgently needs meaningful gun control. I support the four-point platform of the Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence shared in Benjamin Van Houten’s Yes Magazine piece (written after Representative Gabrielle Gifford’s shooting in 2011). It’s been making the rounds again after the massacre perpetrated by Adam Lanza …
It’s that time of the year again, when my inner voices have an unending argument that may even sound a little like some families’ Christmas-dinner conversation writ large: You don’t understand how I feel! The whole world isn’t about you! Why do I have to play by your rules? The word for today, dear readers, …
As I write this, my plane has just taken off from Heathrow, seven hours after its scheduled departure. I spent six of them on the tarmac, trying to soothe the part of my brain that was spinning a story about British Airways’ incompetence. That was fairly challenging: during the previous hour, I’d stood in the …