A kind reader directed me to The Singing Revolution, a film on Estonians’ movement to regain their independence from the Soviet Union, highlighting the special role music played in the sustenance of spirit and solidarity. And also, for me, a film on the double meaning of patriotism, both a shining strength—the indispensable key to independence—and …
As the days shorten, I like to walk at four o’clock, when the light turns thick and golden. Everything it touches seems suspended in honey: the waterbird puffing out its feathers to keep warm, the egret gliding by, the tight, lonely clump of sky-blue ceanothus clinging bravely to life, the pile of dog poop a …
I’ve begun to see our perceptual capacities as a kind of funhouse (only not always so much fun). Our paths to clear sight are blocked here by obstacles, there by distorting mirrors. It’s easiest to spot the places a fellow-traveler has been tricked into thinking a mirror is a window; and hardest when we find …
Three days ago, in an essay about the scapegoating of green jobs advisor Van Jones, who was hounded out of office by wingnut Fox commentator Glenn Beck, I wrote this: We must act now to put a brake on scapegoating before it once again becomes the force that controls public life. The issue will not …
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 …
It’s hard not to have an ambivalent relationship with political power, no matter how modest. There’s some truth to the notion that the people who most crave it are least reliable when they have it; but no more truth than there is to the idea that those who are negatively oriented to power will never …
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 …
For several months now, I’ve been ending every talk I give with the same message to artists and activists: This moment of seismic shifts and insecurity in economies, governments and communities challenges us to make our work equally valid and powerful as art, as spiritual practice and as political speech or action. The first time …
What is the extent of our capacity for imaginative empathy? When is it easy to put oneself in the place of other, and when is the stretch too far to manage? I don’t have much trouble imagining how Henry Louis Gates felt earlier this week when he was arrested at the door of his own …
My media cravings lately have been the audiovisual equivalent of Elvis’s peanut butter and banana sandwiches, stupefying comfort food. A kind friend actually sat next to me for the entire length of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants—Part 2!—on TV. So I gulped hard when my forgetfulness in updating my Netflix queue brought me Terror’s …