back in the valley

Amherst, MA
a.k.a. The Happy Valley

It is cool for summer. In fact, the chill at night feels more like autumn. Otherwise the lush, bright greens (of trees, grass, cultivated crops and wild bush), sky and mountain blues, and varying tones of white in the clouds are as they ever were. I got out on the bike trail yesterday, smelling … Read more...

We are all guilty here

online discussion forum

Language is a force.
Language names, and by naming, it calls into being. This is how social reality is constructed and maintained. I think it is an effect of quantum mechanics, but smarter minds than mine are needed to make the connections in a compelling scientific manner.
Last fall I wrote a post on some dynamics Read more...

Dear Carole,

I don’t want your departure to hurt so much, but it does.
Silly, I know. I’m watching the wind blow lush spring foliage like currents in the sea, swirling in multiply-rippled design – now unfurling a wide swath then cutting back against itself, sweeping into new unpredictable configurations and keeping me guessing, waiting, eager for the next sussuration. I envision … Read more...

barefoot on Belgian soil

Duerne

The park is magical. As are all the public, cultivated spaces here: I’m given the sense of a holodeck – programmed to appear wild but the evidence of human design remains.

06 lamppost.jpg
Doesn’t that remind you of the lamppost on the other side of the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe? (I have refrained from watching … Read more...

“Triangles” and twilight

Edinburgh
written (mostly) at the time
was waiting to upload photos!

Most of the Middle Eastern Spirituality and Peace Festival is over, there were only two events that lingered past my arrival Sunday [15 March] – I chose to add them to my tourist itinerary as prep for the Dialogue Under Occupation conference that I dash to next.
I spent … Read more...

Random constructions of meaning (something stinks!)

Strasbourg

Fill in the blank:

    • “What are you doing ___________(here)?”

 

    • in Belgium

 

    • at the European Parliament

 

    • in Europe

 

    • on the planet

 

It always sounds a bit pompous to respond factually, “doing research for my dissertation,” or, alternatively, “trying to contribute to a more peaceable world.” One needs regular doses of humor … Read more...

lessons in patience (“so many kinds of mirrors”)

Soul Inn
Delft, Holland

who is writing who?.jpg

It occurs to me that I have an occasionally-troubled relationship with time. The patience of the Dutch impresses me: the decades and generations, for instance, of carefully reclaiming land from the sea. The paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the woodcuts and lithographs by M.C. Escher, bespeak a lifetime of deeply-responsive and engaged living. Vermeer, we … Read more...

“unfailing, uninterrupted life”

Soul Inn
Delft, Holland

It is this sunlight,
endlessly refreshed, that allows the grass to grow,
the birds to sing — and you to live. The Sun’s
energy flows through your breakfast cereal, your morning coffee,
your veins and your mind.
It animates you
as it has animated almost all the Earth’s life for billions of years.
Read more...