As Above, So Below… Interbeing for the New Year

There is no doubt 2022 was an, ahem, challenging year worldwide. I felt it, and I suspect you did, too. As the saying by Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary figure associated with the beginning of alchemy, the birth of material and spiritual science goes: as above, so below. In other words, what goes on in the…

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The Wheel Turns To Remind Us

A blessed Lughnasadh/Lammas to all. After a brutal spate of heat (that many are still suffering), I woke to a cool wet morning. The creek has been alarmingly low these past weeks. The deer tiptoe across and barely get their hooves wet. It rained for a couple of hours last night, but hardly enough to…

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New Perspectives, Old Simplicities

Ever since those astonishing photos taken by the Webb telescope were released my inbox has been filled with emails discussing them. It’s a mixed bag of astonishment, wonder, and, well, horror.  Seems more than a few people have been sent spinning into existential dread, right along with the stars and galaxies spinning in the images.…

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You Are Only Free When Everyone Is Free

  My friend, Robin Bates, author of Better Living Through Beowulf, wrote a wonderful essay that threw me back in my seat, exactly as a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer did to him. Everything that needs to be said is here, so I am reprinting it, with his permission.  He says: “Sometimes I’ll come across…

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An Age of Questions

What a week. A new Supreme Court Justice, the first Black woman. And oh, what work she has to do since SCOTUS has overturned Roe vs Wade and has effectively gutted the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight climate change.  Sadly, more absurd decisions are expected in the future. Then there is the war in Ukraine,…

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Roe vs Wade Overturned. How many women will die?

I tell myself to keep quiet, but I can’t keep quiet. To be clear: I am pro-life. By this I mean I hold all life sacred, from the ant to the eagle, from the bot-fly to the barrier reef, from the dandelion to the old-growth forest, every fawn and rattlesnake, every vulture and morning dove.…

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Nuclear calm?

I am old enough, God help me, to remember “duck and cover.” Back at the dawn of time, in the height of the Cold War, even in a small town outside of Montreal, Quebec, we school children of the era understood that “duck and cover” meant a nuclear bomb was headed our way and that…

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Coexisting, by accident?

My Best Beloved, The Ailing Rescuepoo* and I are up at our cabin by a creek in the mountains of Pennsylvania. We love it up here, and my new tag line is, “You can learn a lot sitting by a creek.” Here was yesterday’s lesson. We were walking the Ailing Rescuepoo* along the creek road,…

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Who Goes Through The Rowan Door?

When I was eight years old, my teacher, Mrs. Green, read to our class C.S. Lewis’s classic tale of adventure, love, faith, and redemption, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe. I was enthralled and immediately went on to read the entire seven-book series. It was only in the final book, The Last Battle, however, that I…

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Lessons on How a Democracy Becomes a Gilead

I was going to attempt to write a post this morning on my thoughts concerning the Supreme Court and Roe vs Wade, however, my friend, Professor Robin Bates from Sewanee University, has done the heavy lifting for me in this excellent essay that came over the transom this morning. I have his permission to share…

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