A few incidentals about this spring …
Birds are singing in the deep starless night, not brief warbles but grand and lengthy songs, whether at midnight or 3 a.m. or on through morning.
The annual scattering of sunflowers from bird seed fosters more robust flowers than any gardener’s hand could ensure. When the flowers grow large enough, [...]
The greatest challenge to one who wants to live in simplicity is to be able to do so fully and not as a psychological excursion cushioned by an economic safety net. People who have grown up in poverty tend to lack the psychological willingness — having gotten out of poverty — to throw away their [...]
Silence is generally feared in Western circles, especially among friends or colleagues. Silence is defined exclusively in social terms, and, of course, silence will not be considered helpful in such settings. In social settings, one is expected to participate, to contribute to the brain-storming, the evaluating, the planning, the negotiating.
In the Western world, consensus conflicts [...]
In his book In Silence: Why We Pray, author Donald Spoto notes that the only legitimate form of prayer in the Western scriptural tradition (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is, minimally, the prayer of abandonment. Only thusly can the notion of projecting human desires on God and claiming God’s sanctions for our personal and cultural demands — [...]