Posts by a featured contributor

Winter’s Heart: A Sex in the Garden Essay

In the heart of winter, I contemplate my winter’s heart. Frigid days bring sinking into slush puddles against the icy wind, starting the day with cold feet, jumping into a dark car only to join the cattle call of the highway. I have to refuse this heart. My heart is elsewhere. I am consumed by the memory of a rose. Take a rose petal in your hand. Stroke it. Lift

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The Flute

One late August morning, I found myself on a rugged dirt road on the east side of San Pedro Mesa, high above the Sanchez Reservoir. I was with a man I had met not two hours before. I had set up this appointment with him to discuss the concerns involving the feral and abandoned horses that roamed this part of the San Luis Valley. We met in a public place,

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Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer, Will, and Life’s Composition

In his splendid essay called “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” Schopenhauer points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition

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Blank Pages Along the Beach: Soldiers’ Diaries of the Gallipoli Campaign

“The herdsmen wandering by the lonely rills, marks where they lie on the scarred mountain flanks. Remembering that mild morning when the hills shook to the roar of guns, and those wild Franks surged upward from the sea.”[1] –The ANZAC Book As morning broke on Sunday April 25th 1915, Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), British, French, Indian, Irish, and Senegalese troops awoke before the sun to prepare for

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Nikola Tesla on the energy of a single thought

Nature may reach the same result in many ways. Like a wave in the physical world, in the infinite ocean of the medium which pervades all, so in the world of organisms, in life, an impulse started proceeds onward, at times, may be, with the speed of light, at times, again, so slowly that for ages and ages it seems to stay, passing through processes of a complexity inconceivable to

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The Buddha on Loving Kindness

Even as a mother protects with her life         Her child, her only child, So with a boundless heart         Should one cherish all living beings; Radiating kindness over the entire world:         Spreading upwards to the skies, And downwards to the depths;         Outwards and unbounded, Freed from hatred and ill will.         Whether

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