Meditations

I’ve given precedence to direct experiencing of the numinous since I was 18 and had an explosive insight that changed the course of my life. Over the years, many strange…

The most exquisitely graceful phenomenon I’ve ever seen in nature is the flight of a hovering kite falling gently to earth from 100 meters above the fields. Unlike its distant…

Questions regarding the nature of the observer have been arising from readers and in dialogue. For example, a reader asks: “Is the observer the origin of suffering?” We have to…

A late afternoon thunderstorm yesterday gave way to clouds and cool temperatures today. The sun shone enough in the afternoon however, to invite a long meditation beside the stream. On…

The strictest monks in Catholicism are “Cistercians of the Strict Observance,” usually known as Trappists. They pray six times a day, beginning at 3:30 a.m. Thomas Merton was a Trappist,…

It’s near dusk, and the parkland is teeming with Cooper’s hawks. One of the large, brown, stipple-winged raptors takes off from the path ahead of me with some small animal…

In an otherwise confusing and contradictory op-ed in the New York Times, Roy Scranton, a professor of English at Notre Dame, makes a true statement: “The problem of climate change…

An early morning rain, the first real rain in a few months, completely changed the atmosphere along the creek. In a single day, the season went from summer to autumn.…