Being Present (Somehow)
1. Do not avoid contact with suffering or close your eyes before suffering. Do not lose awareness of the existence of suffering in the life of the world. Find ways to be with those who…
Month: August 2021
A Little Encouragement, Friday Morning
Three of you four gayOne married to Zionist royalty Whitman was awesomeWrote no-big-deal stuff too Reznikoff was superbYet suffered anonymity Ginsberg was world-influentialScribbled drivel sometimes You can (I know) write verse with vervePrompt a tear,…
Surrealism as a Way of Life
Robert Johnson played last night at that café on Sugar Street. Walt Whitman was detained after chanting “Song of the Open Road” at the Huwarra Checkpoint. Dorothy Day was photographed again just sitting in the…
Pursue Knowledge Even to China
The Content of Character: Ethical Sayings of the Prophet MuhammadCollected by Shaykh Al-Amin Mazrui Sarah Ali gave me this book as an expression of gratitude for writing her a letter of recommendation. We will discuss…
A Letter from 2005
April 6, 2005 Dear Andrew, I recently finished a small book by Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, and it made me think of many conversations we’ve had over the past couple of years. So…
Gatha for Takuya, Mayuko, Takeshi, Nana, Minami and Me
Breathing in, we don’t know the future.Breathing out, we almost smile.
Righteous, Remorseful Jews
As my 61st birthday approaches, I’ve noticed that I have recently been going back to authors and works I read many years ago. For example, I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s Asian Journal, William D. Miller’s…
The Pleasure of Dwelling on Things We Have Read
Zilbadone, noun, Italian. A zibaldone is an Italian vernacular commonplace book. The word means “a heap of things” or “miscellany” in Italian. The earliest such books were kept by Venetian merchants in the fourteenth century,…
Share the Wealth with Sari Althubyani: Cultivating Empathy
I had the good fortune of having Sari in two clases at Maryville University. He also came to at least 20 Sunday Share the Wealth events, so I am happy to ask him to share with…
Merton’s Journal
Calcutta is shocking because it is all of a sudden a totally different kind of madness, the reverse of that other madness, the mad rationality of affluence and overpopulation. America seems to make sense,…