• Our election seen from Asia

    When a blond American traveler wears an Obama sticker–

  • Orbs at a post-election rally

    Digital cameras have certainly revolutionized the orb-chasing business. This from an email via a friend, who had received it from a friend who had gone to the election night Obama rally in Grant Park in Chicago. There were more photos but I have limited the number to three (and turned them from bitmaps to JPEGs)…

  • Too much news

    “The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.” Wordsworth wrote that 200 years ago, before telegraph, telephone, radio, television, or fax machines, let alone PCs, internet and PDAs. He should see us now! I awoke this morning dissatisfied, aware that once again I had allowed…

  • Neglecting this blog

    It is always a delicate balance, like breathing. You can’t always be breathing out, you can’t always be breathing in. If the two halves of the rhythm don’t alternate smoothly, you’ve got problems. Similarly, you’ve got to keep a balance between absorbing new material (whether by reading or other experience) and expressing what you know.…

  • Papa Hemingway

      In rereading The Sun Also Rises, I realized for the first time that Hemingway did not admire or entirely approve of his narrator. At least, that was my conclusion. So, I asked him. Papa? That right? Is your narrator you, however many of your traits you may have given him? Yes, I didn’t approve…

  • Fixed and fluid

      I was writing to myself in my journal the other day: “My living is slipping through my life, unwritten, unrecorded save on the Akashic record. Why is that?” Then it occurred to me to ask! (It still slips my mind, continually, that I can always ask.)

  • Politics, society, and the individual

    What is one vote among so many? Well…

  • As we move through chaos

    It doesn’t have to be terrifying; it can be sort of fun

  • Now that the elections are over…

    Years ago I read a very enlightening book by a man named Charles Hampden-Turner called Radical Man, in which he argued, from a psychological viewpoint, that when people spend enough time seeing things in a dualistic manner, they can lose the ability to perceive opportunities for cooperation across whatever lines separate them from their opponents.…

  • Spreading happiness like a contagion

    Resolve to be happy, and help those around you!