Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island died yesterday. One of the good ones… http://www.wpri.com/video/videoplayer.swf Read more

Today is the feast of Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian Orthodox mystic and saint. As is the tradition within Christian churches, one’s feast day marks one’s death, in Searaphim’s case on this day in 1833. It set me to thinking a little about how the universal is really ever only known within the particular. And the many traps thrown along that way, snares laid out both by the devil and by God… In the nineteen sixties I stumbled upon the... Read more

Helen Suzman died today. She was a persistent thorn in the side of the apartheid regime, calling for peaceful but relentless opposition to the evil… For thirty-six years, thirteen as the sole member of Parliament from the Progressive Party, she used her place to denounce apartheid and to call for a nonracial South Africa. And, finally, she stood at her old friend Nelson Mandela’s side when in 1996 he signed the country’s new nonracial constitution. A person of strong personality... Read more

About a million years ago I was young and studying Zen as an unsui with Jiyu Kennett, living in her monastery which was then located in Oakland, California. This was long before her notorious visions. The community would eventually acquire property in Mt Shasta, in far northern California, but this was well before that time, as well… The roshi had fallen in with Alan Watts who would eventually help her get her first book published. Watts had been given a... Read more

Well, it is almost over! Thank goodness… Now with scant hours to go, I wish you all the best for the new year, perhaps something big and splashy… and, if it seems right, perhaps with a little romance… Read more

I notice that among many other things that happened on this last day of the year, that in 1999, Elliot Richardson died. For me he is most notable as the Attorney General who refused President Nixon’s order to fire Special Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox as he was coming dangerously close to the president’s deeply guarded secrets. Of course this was simply one marker on a distinguished career. Richardson was a genuine hero during the Second war, he served as Massachusetts’s’... Read more

Thanks to Ballard Street for this critical early (and continuing) insight into what one finds upon the meditative way… Read more

Bless all librarians. Thank you, Agnes… Read more

Thank you JibJab… Read more

It’s been two years since Saddam Hussein was hung. While I am opposed to the death penalty on principle, I have to admit it is hard to mourn his passing. Still, noting the moment does set me to thinking a bit about Mr Bush’s war. We sit at an interesting place, the confluence of the surge and the awakening has given the Iraqi government a bit of breathing room and provides us with a fig leaf to allow us for... Read more