War Prayers ~ Mark Twain and Lao Tse on the artlessness of war
Yesterday the people of The United States of America marked Memorial Day. It’s a day of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, of families and communities gathering to celebrate the arrival of summer. It’s a day of flags and bunting and red, white & blue and national pride, and a day to memorialise the millions [...]
The second book of The Way ~ Stephen Mitchell illuminates the Tao again.
Mmmmm… a day of cloudy wet so a retreat into a tub of hot water with salsa & tortilla chips and a good book about one of my favourite subjects, Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao (Dao, Tao, same thing, same pronunciation: Dao). Hmmmm… the liner notes of this book explain that the [...]
Jason Bourne and identity — who am I?
Who are you? Are you the sum of your experiences, your actions, your memories? Are you your dreams, your plans, your aspirations, the person you’ll someday become? Are you your past, or your destiny or your present? The best films in any genre are always the ones that touch on essential human questions. What is [...]
We’re too good to be this political ~ Be the change you want to see in the world
My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the hot water, and possibly bubbles. [...]
Desert Dragstrip ~ Zen and the Art of Observation at any Speed
In 1974, Robert M. Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, an extraordinary book about an extraordinary journey. The bit about touring around the U.S.A. on a motorcyle is good too. This book captivated me in my early 20s. The mystical philosophy of ‘goodness’ Pirsig explores fascinates me. It’s not a perfect book, [...]
Get Miles Away to find your way home ~ Gomez, Thomas Moore and Tristan
The year 2000 was an extraordinary one. It was the year I wrote and produced my play, Prisoners, which in itself marked several milestones on my spiritual path. And there was this girl. A dark beauty who rekindled my passion for music. Gomez was just one of the bands we caught live that year at [...]
3 Things I Learned About Rejection By Being Accepted ~ A Traveller’s Tale
This post is an expansion of a comment I made on Daryl Sedore’s article, Why Rejection Letters are Great appearing on Write to Done. Sedore reminds us that in all endeavours we can expect to be rejected one or more times before being accepted. Every rejection is a good thing; we should look at each [...]
The Dao de Jing ~ The transformational quality of seeing the beauty in all things.
I can’t remember when I first encountered The Dao de Jing (also Tao te Ching, pronounced the same), which surprises me since it quickly grew to become my favourite written text. It’s brief (just 81 chapters of verse, a page or so each) yet richly nuanced. I’ve read all or parts of it dozens of [...]
The Fool’s day in April
April is my month of the extraordinary. In April 1991, I took the first job I was offered after having been unceremoniously fired by my previous employer. A year later, I’d had enough of the computing industry and was poised to quit that job…when Microsoft bought the company I was working for and made me [...]
The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith
The following is a comment storm that blew out of a seemingly innocent status message I posted on Facebook. It got a few of us thinking, and I think the thinking in it, on all sides, is interesting. Note that the quote, by Stephen Edwards, is not taken from the book, The Tao of Physics, [...]
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