My sweetheart loves to fly fish. He never keeps the fish, just tenderly tips them back into the sea. So he’s plugged into various fishing networks, some devoted to survival of species that are imperiled by human impact. He’s the one who turned me onto Twyla Roscovich’s quite remarkable film, Salmon Confidential. The film painstakingly …
Today’s my birthday. I share it this year with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a calendrical accident that confers the spiritual equivalent of a contact high. But for me, a birthday is always an occasion. Every year has a distinct character and completeness that begs to be understood: I want to hang it on the …
I woke up in the middle of a dream this morning. Side-by-side with a young woman (I can see her earnest face so clearly, the tumble of dark curls that nearly covered it), I strolled through an encampment occuping a city square. We stepped over bodies, threading our way through a maze of conversations. “Before …
Public policy should be driven by a few essential questions: Who are we? What do we stand for? How do we want to be remembered; what is our legacy to the future? These foundational questions underpin this second essay on the jobs plan we need. Before you dismiss this out of hand as absurdly idealistic, …
The world didn’t end yesterday (unless the next world includes a bus from New York to Philadelphia equipped with the electrical outlets and wifi that enabled me to write this essay). Yes, I’ve been on the road all spring, a condition that tends to impair my ability to focus on a single topic long enough …
I don’t know if this is a political problem, a spiritual one, or a psychological one: I’m fairly certain it’s all of the above. Or maybe it just feels that way based on all the space it’s taking up in my mind. How do people overcome the obstacles—fatigue, disappointment, magical thinking—that make them reluctant to …
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Dr. Martin Luther King In the Hebrew calendar, this is the time of t’shuvah, literally turning, but often translated as repentance. In preparation for the new …
I wish so many people didn’t hate the phrase “paradigm shift,” because it really does the job of conveying one highly specific thought: that an old model of how things work is receding at the approach of a new and more powerful model (in the words of Ken Wilber, one that “subsumes and transcends” the …
My heart goes out to President Obama on his thus far unrequited desire to form a more perfect union with the other party. I understand what he is trying to do, but I’m worried that he doesn’t understand why it won’t succeed just now. Consensus is a beautiful idea. In Aristotle’s philosophy, everything has a …
With timing I’d like to claim as atypical but is probably the opposite, we are trying to sell our house. That puts me somewhere near the bleeding edge of the rather remarkable shakeout we are now experiencing. The image that keeps coming to me is a Gargantuan dog arising from slumber, noisily shaking itself awake, …