Wherever We Are Useful
Katharina Mommsen, Goethe’s Art of Living Trafford, 2003 Translators: John Crosetto, John Whaley, Renee M. Schell A teacher who can awaken a sense of a single good deed or a single good poem accomplishes more…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
A Call to Life and Deeds: Goethe’s Maxims
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections Translated by Elisabeth Stopp; edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Hutchinson; Penguin Books, 1998 I’ve been reading Pierre Hadot’s 2008 book, N’oublie pas de vivre:…
Facing the Burden of History
Dorothee Sölle, The Arms Race Kills even without War This is a short collection of talks (rallies, radio programs) mostly given to German audiences in the days when West Germany still existed. The context for…
Making the World Bearable: A Reading/Writing Class on Diane di Prima—Fall 2018
Feeling a need to be inspired in these dismal times? Been burnt out with academic writing that doesn’t originate in your soul? Seeking a community of comrades to inspire, console, and rouse you? Wanting to…
Making It Be Spring with Everything
Burton Watson, Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings, Columbia University Press, 1996 Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know…
“Renounce and Enjoy”
Mohandas Gandhi used the Bhagavad Gita as his go-to source for dealing with life’s daily problems and issues. A short book of 700 verses, the Gita grounded and inspired Gandhi throughout his life. Like other …
Reading of Dorothy’s Reading
The Dorothy Day Book, compiled by Margaret Quigley and Michael Garvey, is a kind of posthumous commonplace book, that is, a collection of quotations from Dorothy’s decades of reading (largely from her column in the…
Where the Tortured and the Torturer Shook Hands
How many of our most famous novelists, for instance, have bothered to take the two-and-a-half hour flight from Miami and see for themselves what’s going on here? —Lawrence Ferlinghetti I first read Seven Days…
A Ramadan Sonnet by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
for Sharifa Barakat Headache, the invalid feeling of being sickly and having to take it easy, testiness when things don’t go quite right, annoyance of magnetic gravity, things fall in a pile or slide off…
Three Questions
Gregg Krech, Naikan: Gratitude, Grace, and the Japanese Art of Self-Reflection (Stone Bridge Press, 2001) I learned of Naikan through consulting the bibliography of Patricia Ryan Madson’s book, Improv Wisdom. Therein, she cited books on…