Yesterday afternoon I called the surgeon’s office to inquirer about the status of the lymph node biopsy from auntie’s mastectomy thirteen days ago. The person with whom I spoke said the biopsy was in but the doctor was not. I asked if Joan the nurse supreme was available & was told they would ask her to get back to me. But she didn’t. Last night I awoke at two in the morning and didn’t get back to sleep until somewhere... Read more

Today is Julian’s feast in the Roman calendar. She was commemorated among Anglicans and Lutherans a couple of days ago… Read more

I came a tad late to the Star Trek thing. I missed pretty much the whole first season, and this was the sixties, and my young adulthood, after all, so I wasn’t sitting watching lots of television. First there were drugs. Then Zen… But I liked what I saw. According to Wikipedia, Gene Roddenberry pitched it as “wagon train to the stars” while telling his close associates it really would be Gulliver’s Travels with two levels of storyline. While that... Read more

I have a minor bug (not swine flu, but maybe piglet flu) and that’s leaving me a bit out of sorts as I crowd up with the colleagues. I passed on the sing along last night & I’m also giving a pass to the outside program today with a prominent UU musician. But I’m making all the regular clergy get together stuff, the business meetings, and what not. The bug probably contributes to my general level of grumpitude, but I... Read more

I’m almost packed for the annual Ballou Channing District Unitarian Universalist Minister’s retreat. It starts just ahead of lunch today and runs through lunch on Wednesday. We’ll be gathering at an RC retreat facility in Wareham. Interestingly I’ve been at this facility for a Zen retreat a couple of years ago. (Not a good experience, actually. The priests understood Zen and were even enthusiastic about our coming. The staff thought we were a cult and were singularly unhelpful, to the... Read more

Jiddu Krishnamurti was born on this day in 1897. (correction, Krishnamurti was born on the 12th of May, 1897. I jumped a day…) In his childhood he was identified by prominent Theosophists as the next world teacher. By which they meant the next Christ or Buddha. They proclaimed when he came into his adulthood he would speak truths that would be hard to hear. They were right. Pretty much as soon as he grew up he repudiated the titles as... Read more

On this day in 1994 Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as president of South Africa. It is said that when Benjamin Franklin was leaving the constitutional convention of 1787 a citizen asked him whether our new country was going to be a monarchy or a republic. Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Mandela delivered a republic to South Africa. And while none of the men who have followed rise to Mandela’s stature, they have allowed fair votes (more... Read more

Thank you, Jan! Read more

Over the past weeks I’ve found myself pointed by numerous friends to a NY Times Magazine article, “Enlightenment Therapy.” Then it found itself being discussed at the Zen teacher’s listserv to which I belong. So, finally I decided I had to read it. It’s pretty interesting stuff. The author Chip Brown seems to have had a long time interest in matters of the mind. It is telling, I find, that his undergraduate studies included both literature and biochemistry and one... Read more

A clip from the film Waking Life. Read more