Labyrinths

Increasingly, labyrinths are being used as psychological therapy, the idea being that there is an exit after the challenges, which is reassuring and builds conf...

Egrets

The half a dozen egrets are barely visible as they feed in a watery ditch below the ground line of green and brown. Behind them is a solid wall of dark green wo...

Owl

In the pre-dawn fog, a lone owl quietly hoots his five notes, three short, then two low and longer. He is not the rooster attempting to awaken anyone with loud ...

“Walk alone”

Most spiritual traditions expect that the individual will need to associate with a group of practitioners and learn from a master or spiritual director. This as...

Justice III

Documentary war photographs, says Susan Sontag among others, have the potential to stir the viewer to aspirations for peace as much as prurient and violent pass...

Mantras

Nearly all meditative practices, East or West, employ a mantra or sound or prayer as a focal object. But the mantra becomes an accompaniment, for it is contrive...

“News”

A professor I knew conceived of a little experiment for understanding what affects us and what affects the world, though he put it in more modest terms. He prop...

Selfishness

The most common objection to the solitary life is that it is selfish. But everyone in society participating in the popular culture around them is “selfish...

Bird Serif

Birds are flying southward. At twilight their magnificent companies appear suddenly in the sky, flying in the typical “V” shape, some precise, some ...

Extroversion

In his Parabola interview, Fr. Dunstan Morrissey says that “one has to be naturally extroverted” to cope with solitude, because solitude is embraced...