I don't know if you've ever stood on a stage and been the focus of attention during a national emergency. It's kind of intense. Read more
I don't know if you've ever stood on a stage and been the focus of attention during a national emergency. It's kind of intense. Read more
The ideas that he loved, the roundness of the geometer's circle, the inarguable perfection of a syllogism, the well-ordered words of a poem or the perfectly timed and ideally harmonious notes of a musical composition -- these were eternal and unchanging. Death and decay and renewal and change, the ceaseless churn of the physical world, all seemed...unseemly, somehow déclassé, to young Otalp. Read more
But over-engineering the garden ruins the fruit, give us those cardboard supermarket genetically-engineered tomatoes instead of those succulent products of the sun and soil that grow naturally on the vine. Read more
Why do we live? Read more
In those moments I feel like I had no choice, in the same way that I have no choice when I sit down and try to write a poem and find that I've used a word that is just wrong. Some sense in my brain nags and nags at me until I fix it. Read more
If there's something that you wanted to do in the past but never did -- it's not too late. If you quit something and regret it -- you can start again. Read more
I've always held with the old saw that says we should all be concerned about the future, as that is where we will spend the rest of our lives; and I've given considerable thought to the topic of Paganism and the future. It strikes me that the word we often use to talk about the contemporary Pagan movement, "Neopaganism", has "neo", "new", right there in the name, suggesting something that's looking to the future. I don't think it's a coincidence that we have so many computer professionals and engineers and technological, future-looking folk in the Pagan community. Read more
I look back at this after fifteen years, and it’s not terrible. I’ve come to deeper and more nuanced understandings of each of these points, but nothing that makes me disavow this explanation. So then, what are those deeper and more nuanced understandings? What have I found that makes me keep each of these elements as a part of my well-balanced spiritual practice, and recommend them to others? Read more
There can be plenty of enchantment in the objective world-view. There is a form of beauty in seeing how the moon's orbit and the arc of a pop fly follow the same Newtonian law of universal gravitation. Cantor's diagonalization proof that there are more real numbers than rational numbers is one of the most beautiful things I know. Read more
All throughout the massacres of the 20th century, but most especially on that day of shame seven decades ago, traditional religions failed. Christianity failed. Buddhism failed. Shintō failed. Every child burned to death in the flash over Hiroshima, every lingering case of radiation poisoning or leukemia, testifies to the fact that the spiritual systems of our past are inadequate to the challenges of a technological species. Read more
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