The Inner Life

Following an afternoon of family mayhem and mother's day celebration (which included a lively crew of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, mothers and their various husbands, children and pets), I felt drawn to write a post honoring the universal energy which animates us all - the Divine Mother - who compassionately conceived the...

Recognizing a poem as a poem used to be as easy as waiting for the predictable chime of a rhyme (no rhyme intended). But since the free verse movement about a century ago, when poetry by-in-large stopped rhyming and moving to the rhythm of the metronome, poets have been writing...

Yogis have always known there's a significant difference between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure comes from getting what you want: for example food, good sex, clothes, etc. But pleasure is short-lived and fickle. It lasts for as long as it lasts--a few hours at best. And then it's gone. Pleasure is...

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -William Shakespeare

I've been thinking a lot about words lately and how they shape our lives, often with little conscious attention directed toward them. My thoughts came in the aftermath of...

Some conversions take a lifetime.

For the Rev. Carroll "Bud" Pickett, it took 95.

Pickett, a Presbyterian minister, was the death house chaplain at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, where,...

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness." Faith is a seed of infinite potential. Faith holds all possibilities within it. Yet, what does faith mean in our modern age of reason?

Faith seems not quite natural to the...

Maybe it's because I spent the week trying to avoid round-the-clock Reverend Wright coverage, yearning for the days before I knew the meaning of the word "superdelegate," but I found myself wandering (way) back into books I loved as a kid, revisiting some of the first poems I ever read....

Over the last ten years, the art of photography has undergone a sex change. The rather masculine act of capturing or "shooting" a moment ("the hunt") with a sound subject and composition has evolved into one where the real art comes in the editing, not the capturing. The initial "kill"...

My silent treatments started 15 years ago. Stressed out, worn out and wigged out, I wanted out - of town, that is. But I was in no shape to make travel plans, so a friend of mine took one look at me and, over my feeble protestations, signed me up...

Last Sunday, I saw a report on the CBS Sunday morning news about a soldier (two duties in Iraq) being discriminated against in the U.S. military because of his 'atheist' belief. This story is another reflection of what seems to be a growing elevation of religion into so many aspects...

"In South Carolina, a truckload of dirt is the same price as a video game!" reports Norman McGee, a father in that state who bought a small pickup-load of dirt for his daughter and friends.

McGee is turning consciousness into action. So is Liz Baird, who keeps a "wonder bowl"...

In previous posts, I've written about the possibility of liberating ourselves from the confines of personal identity - the conditioning borrowed from our tribe, caste, race, religion, gender, ideology, political party or other affiliations which make us smaller than the whole.

Politically speaking, I was raised in a moderately...

If you've missed Rudy Giuliani's 9-11 exploitation ads or waited anxiously for Swiftboaters to start running some shadowy Bin Laden video, this 2008 Democratic primary is for you! At the rate it's devolving, voters in South Dakota and Montana can look forward to Deal or No Deal getting interrupted by...

In the wake of Earth Day, green-bordered magazines and quivering news reports of Global Warming, it could be easy to dismiss the occasion as an over commercialization on par with Christmas. But one only need to discover the plastic mass twice the size of Texas in the middle of...

Our oldest son recently graduated from college and has been trying to figure out 'what's next' in life. It has been a source of painful reminders of how uncertain we are at various stages of life, how little we believe we know, and how unsure we are of our own...

Hope's Hospice near the city of Montego Bay used to be a place where Jamaicans suffering from AIDS went to die. Now that the disease is more treatable, it's where they struggle to live--the frontline of Jamaica's growing battle against HIV/AIDS. The center's doors are open to anyone who suffers...

My gallery is in a unique place in Culver City that has one gallery after another, with the occasional hip café and museum. Often the galleries synchronize their opening nights and hundreds of people can be found milling along La Cienega Boulevard going from one show to another. It was...