Before and After ~ Stephen Mitchell’s Second Book of the Dao

The Second Book of the Tao, Stephen Mitchell (trans)

I was digging into Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Dao one day back in January (over a lovely Red Snapper Soup @ Granville Island) when a passage in the second chapter inspired the following poem.

Read more »

War Prayers ~ Mark Twain and Lao Tse on the artlessness of war

Mark Twain ~ War Prayer

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 […]

Read more »

We’re too good to be this political ~ Be the change you want to see in the world

The Second Book of the Tao, Stephen Mitchell (trans)

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 […]

Read more »

Love, strength and courage ~ The greatest things you’ll ever learn

The greatest thing you'll ever learn...

Every now and again I post a status message on Facebook that generates a comment storm. And every now and again, that comment storm generates ideas good enough for a blog post, as it did with The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith. Yesterday morning I […]

Read more »

Courage

The Tragically Hip ~ Fully Completely

I started a post about courage, featuring this song, a couple or three weeks ago. It’s still sitting in the drafts folder. The Tragically Hip are a favourite Canadian band from the late ’80s and early ’90s, a time when I, and many other Canadians, considered them the best rock […]

Read more »

To Kill a Mockingbird: the courage of Atticus Finch

Too Kill a Mockingbird ~ The Verdict is Read

It’s the 50th anniversary of the publishing of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I’ve got the film paused, just after the scene in which the verdict is handed down. Guilty. Both the film and the book resonate very deeply with me, in all the themes they touch […]

Read more »

Courage is…: Joannie Rochette & Petra Majdič

The greatest achievement of this 2010 Winter Olympic games wasn’t Canada’s first Gold medal, or its last, or any other Gold or Silver medal awarded in the Olympics. The two most courageous performances in the Olympics netted Bronze. One was a battle as much with emotional trauma as with any […]

Read more »