sparking imagination
As much as I hate them, the evils we are witnessing unwittingly give us the grace of blatantly showcasing their wrongness. Seeing evil clearly should motivate us to walk away from it. Repentance is not as hard with such clarity: … Continued
We are encountering the demands and barriers which have reached incredible heights since the last time we searched for a rental. How do we survive in such a greedy world? Conventional wisdom bases itself on material options of wealth, position, … Continued
Here is help to pause with nature and reconnect with Life beyond our stresses. Contemplative music accompanying photos we have collected in nature offer eleven minutes of retreat. Many people remember this discipline at this time of year when Lent … Continued
Twenty poems and six essays are paired with thirty-two works of art and photography in this contemplative volume. The poems and essays are drawn from the past decade of my 53 year career as a playwright, visual artist, filmmaker and … Continued
I have always been aware of and preferred my “original self”. It is the free self which I experienced as a child. I was fortunate to have parents who embraced spirituality in all that they did, including parenting. It was … Continued
We visited the exhibit “Monet to Matisse” at the San Diego Museum of Art in July. It contained examples of Les Nabis, a group of artists in the late 1880’s, which affirmed the idea that art was not only a visual or sensory phenomenon, but primarily an intangible experience aided by the artist’s creation.
Putin and his followers (including notable American admirers) are living by an animalistic paradigm we tell ourselves we have left in prehistory. It is the cave man mentality of amassing your personal empire by force and enslavement. Bullying is the … Continued
. . . even if race had not been invented as a way of eliminating competition, our view would still be that the emphasis on devoting one’s life to material gain is an incomplete view of humanity.
I’m reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (1955) in which he describes life transforming to more and more complexity and shows that life continues to grow beyond the outward form. As a prominent paleontologist and naturalist as well as Jesuit priest he believed life sciences should explore not only the outer forms – the skeletons that remain, the physical effects, the material world – but include the “within” – the imagination, consciousness, the spiritual.
It does not take a very discerning analysis to conclude that the driving force of most human endeavor is focused on the material world. We are all living at some level of acquiring, managing, serving, or struggling with the material … Continued
