Though beauty is autonomous, there seem to be occasions when human presence can become congruent with her will. In creative work no amount of force or mechanical management can guarantee beauty. Suddenly, without expecting it, beauty is there. Yet ul...
We are beckoned to see the world through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable. Our memory is struggling to rescue the truth that human rights were not handed down a...
He'd wanted her. Out of all the women in the world, he'd wanted her. Wanted, hell, she thought grinning now. Pursued, demanded. Taken. And while she could admit all of that was exciting, he'd gone one step further. He cherished. She'd never believed ...
Today I don't drive up to the world's religions and say yes I'd like a number 4 Buddhism with a side of Hindi, and two extra servings of New Age and a little bit of Islam sprinkled on top. And a number 11 Prosperity gospel from the desert menu. No, I...
So very offensive the gospel is, and of course, it's pointing out where I was so sure of being right but in fact was so very wrong! At first I turned so hard against it, but now I find myself so in love with it's blunt honest truth. We need more of t...
You don't know me; you never knew my heart. No man knows my history. I cannot tell it: I shall never undertake it. I don't blame any one for not believing my history. If I had not experienced what I have, I would not have believed it myself. I never ...
It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger they were. Sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when the...
A purpose derived from a false premise – that a deity has ordained submission to his will – cannot merit respect. The pursuit of Enlightenment-era goals — solving our world’s problems through rational discourse, rather than through religion a...
Literature shrivels in a universal language, and an uprooted language rots before it dies. And it should be possible to lift the eyes above the cant of the ‘language of Shakespeare’... sufficiently to realise the magnitude of the loss to humanity...
I found that those friends of mine who welcomed the unseen into the realm of their seen offered immediate understanding. Some are Christians, some are not. Most are artists of some kind or other; artistry can extend to a way of being, of living lovin...
Living in the box means being convinced that other people and our circumstances are responsible for our feelings and our helplessness to overcome them. What we can't see when we're in the box is that the way the world appears to us is our projection,...
We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what w...
Outside the window, a bank of clouds appeared on the horizon, inching slowly across the sky, finally slipping across the Moon and blocking out its radiant light. As he clicked off his overhead light, he turned his eyes one last time to the heavens. O...
The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happen...
Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may ha...
According to this law [the law of Dharma], you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world--and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, th...
Be the Rain. I am the rain. The mountain may spit fire at the sky. . . Still the rain will fall. The mountain may quake at the world. . . Still the rain will fall. The mountain will be silent and brooding. . . Still the rain will fall. The mountain w...
In refugee camps around the world, I met people who were gone. They were still walking around but had lost so much that they were unable to claim any sort of identity. Others I met found who they truly were, and they generally found it through servic...
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the...
Treading along in this dreamlike, illusory realm, Without looking for the traces I may have left; A cuckoo's song beckons me to return home; Hearing this, I tilt my head to see Who has told me to turn back; But do not ask me where I am going, As I tr...
Yvette is a woman who looks like a church bell. Her copper body curves with purpose, angles on a chair as if from a tower overlooking a village by the sea. Her bones are strong everywhere, in her cheeks, her shoulders, her hands. They are made from s...
