Favorite Mary Oliver Poems

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention.Be astonished.Tell about it.–Mary Oliver, from “Sometimes” Laura …When I Am Among the Trees When I am among the trees,especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks…

I Was Talking to Ram Dass about You and…

How things were going in Italy–The heat, the workloadThe limited energy for creative endeavorsI sounded a little worried I supposeHe put his arm around my shoulders and said,“She knows the scoreShe knows gratitude is where…

From a Recent Notebook

Of course, Diane di Prima is in My Canon… Because  she honored Suzuki Roshi’s unprecedented presenceBecause she made  the case for old-school being literally in touchBecause she gave primacy to cosmologyBecause I gifted C. with…

Patisotagāmi and NATO

The following will offer you a different take on Russia, Ukraine, and NATO than you hear in the mainstream media: Russell Brand with Aaron Maté: We Have Been Lied To… [11.5 minutes] Scott Ritter: NATO…

Sari

Last night at Medina Mediterranean Grill, I had a farewell dinner with Sari Al-Thubyani before he headed home to Saudi Arabia.  We met in the Maryville parking lot on the first day of school in…

“The Duality of Man”

No wonder, as Martin, Dianne and I have been making our way through Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, that a phrase that I first heard in 1987 has…

Open to Receive Others’ Viewpoints

Do not think that the knowledge that you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth.  Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views.  Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive…

The Good News of Tablet!

Given some of my preoccupations over the decades, I am grateful to have recently discovered Alana Newhouse’s Tablet. The following are a few essays and interviews that focused my mindfulness and provoked my gratitude. Rokhl…

Connect the Dots, Then and Now

All too fresh in my mind is the infuriating experience of experts like Scott Ritter who could prove that virtually all of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) had been destroyed. Neither Ritter nor other…