The Unclad Soul

Here is some Buddha wisdom that speaks to me: “Few are they who cross to the further shore. Most merely run up and down the bank.” How restrained, how meager our experience of life often is. We settle in to comfortable limits and hold on to what we've always thought and believed and done. We walk the old territory up and down the mundane spaces of our days and miss so much. I’m guilty. Most of us are. Huge swaths of our modern society seem locked in some circumscribed routine of thought and action. Where are the social revolutionaries of the past? Where are the political and religious trouble makers, the heroes and heroines who stir up the status quo and arouse change that improves life for all of us? I want to be one of them. Robert Kennedy convinced his president brother that school segregation was intolerable. He fought union corruption and the mafia influence. “We will not stand by or be aloof,” he said in a speech to the University of Georgia Law Scho...

On a recent Moyers and Company broadcast journalist and host Bill Moyers showed a clip of Republican Congressman Paul Broun stating that because he is a Christian he has thrown aside all of his training as a physician and scientist and believes only what the Bible tells him about evolution, climate change and global warming. Here is the brief segment: BILL MOYERS: Right now, two powerful belief systems have converged to counter facts staring us right in the face. Just as the number of Americans who question the science of evolution has gone up, so too has the number who deny that global warming is happening, and that human activity is causing it. This, at a time when the global scientific community is more certain than ever that you and I, and everyone else, are helping to turn up the heat and seal our fate. And here’s the scary political reality: on both fronts, evolution and climate change, radical right Republicans have made denial a litmus test. You can see it embodied i...

In a magnificent poem by Stephen Dunn there are these lines: “The world thought I didn’t understand it, but I did, knew that to parse was to narrow and to narrow was to live one good way. Awash with desire I also knew a little was plenty and more than I deserved. And because I was guilty long before any verdict, my dreams unspeakable, I hunkered down and buttoned up, ready to give the world, if I had to give it anything, no more than a closed-mouth kiss.” It is that closing off to the world, to people, to ourselves, that diminishes life. The world thinks we don’t understand this, but we do. We just too often don’t admit it to ourselves. It is a scary business to live wide open, exposed, accessible, revealing our true thoughts and living by longings and knowledge, insights and beliefs and identity we own and refuse to deny or disguise. How easy it is though, how tempting, to give in to the pressure to live “hunkered down and buttoned u...

In the name of the daybreak and the eyelids of the morning and the wayfaring moon and the night when it departs, I swear I will not dishonor my soul with hatred, but offer myself humbly as a guardian of nature, as a healer of misery, as a messenger of wonder, as an architect of peace. In the name of the sun and its mirrors and the day that embraces it and the cloud veils drawn over it and the uttermost night and the male and the female and the plants bursting with seed and the crowning seasons of the firefly and the apple, I will honor all life —wherever and in whatever form it may dwell—on Earth my home, and in the mansions of the stars. ~ Diane Ackerman

After weeks of refusing to watch the Sunday political news shows I ventured into Meet the Press and Face the Nation this morning. Surprise! Nothing has changed. At all. Same tired arguments. Same petty whining. Same worthless questions being asked. Same boring and highly partisan panelists. Same befuddled hosts. And the same miserable unhealthy destructive atmosphere that oozes out of the television and fills one's home environment with toxic poison. I was reduced to switching over to religious TV. Which lasted only seconds before I nearly lost my breakfast. Can anyone tell me what Ed Young is ever talking about? Other than mindless “winning” and “success” and hating gays in the love of Christ. I even, while surfing, watched for a few minutes Adam Levine tell all of us how a particular skin product helps us look fabulous and well present ourselves to the public. And I like Adam Levine but I had to leave the channel immediately before the glow of this last season's The Voi...

Our maniacal obsession with money in this country is ruining us. This obsession has corrupted and made incompetent our political system. It now works only for the rich and powerful. It is not capitalism that guides our politics; it's greed. Congress is populated not with patriots but with plutocrats, filthy rich money bags recklessly and arrogantly working for themselves and their billionaire patrons not the American people they supposedly represent. According to Stephan Richter, publisher and editor-in-chief of “The Globalist,” a daily online magazine on the global economy and politics, the average American family has a net worth of $120,000. The average American Congressman has a net worth of nearly $700,000. Two-thirds of Congress are millionaires. It is a rich man's club and the rest of the country is not welcome. This obsession with money has corrupted and is making many of our religious institutions irrelevant and repugnant. The prosperity gospel now trumps the tea...

Here in this happy season of enraged shoppers and rude store clerks and Target’s phenomenal credit card security system, there is the real spirit of Christmas. It goes something like this. Work with other nations? Why do we need them? We have no need of them. They’re all primitive countries with terrorists and taxes and people of other colors and strange cultures who don’t even observe Christmas. Who can understand a thing they say anyway. Other countries are useless. God bless America. Obamacare? Good Lord no. We don’t need that. If people are stupid enough to get sick then let them figure out how to get well on their own. I don’t want my tax dollars helping other people. The Bible says help yourself, or something like that. Stop war. Are you kidding? Wars are great. Some of the best movies ever made in this country are war movies. John Wayne is still a hero here. Did you not ever see “The Longest Day” for God’s sake? And besides, who gives a flip about the Germans, ...