Seeing and Being Seen
Suddenly I realized that [Maharaji] knew everything that was going on in my head, all the time, and that he still loved me. Because who we are is behind all that. —Ram Dass [Sri…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
A Note from Long Ago
Mev’s The Struggle Is One was published in the summer of 1994, some months after her glioblastoma surgery.
With Unswerving Steadfastness
Swami Prabhavananda, The Eternal Companion: Brahmananda—His Life and Teachings A while back, through reading the spiritual works of Christopher Isherwood, I became acquainted with his guru, Swami Prabhavananda, who was a devotee of Brahmananda,…
Radiant Bliss
1. Recently ten of us became acquainted with Japanese-American Mayumi Oda in the Writing Our Own History class. Here autobiography had just been published, Sarasvati’s Gift. As an artist Oda had a breakthrough when she…
Love in Action: The Brothers Karamazov Reading Community 2021
“The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us…
True Happiness Is a Verb
Monday 28 December 2020 Dear C, Having written you yesterday about Annie Liebovits and Susan Sontag, I want to mention today that I took the phrase “Wisdom Project” from Sontag in her collection, At the…
Share the Wealth Sunday 27 December 2020
As I was driving in the Central West End this afternoon, I realized that I had not asked a friend to do a Share the Wealth with us this weekend. Then, knowing that Christmas…
Always an Opportunity
Tariq Ali, Conversations with Edward Said 22 May 2006 There’s not much to this 128-page book, a long interview between Ali and Said, “the true chronicler of his people and their occupied homeland,” most all…
Share the Wealth with Natalie Long/Gratitude and Grace: Lessons from a Summer Garden
In late 2019, my partner and I conceived a garden. Rooted in dusty recollections of summer gardening with grandparents, our memories animated a vision that inevitably turned out differently than imagined; as reality eventually supplanted…
Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est la Même Chose
The following is from a 1983 interview with MIT professor Noam Chomsky… Interviewer: If you were to wake up tomorrow morning, and find yourself at the State Department, not MIT, and you were Secretary, what…