Given that I was seven years old in 1968, I didn’t want to hear about college students dropping acid and prancing around nude in public places, or Muhammad Ali shouting, “I ain’t got no beef with them Viet Cong!” or the Soviet menace, or Richard Nixon, or Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, or Herman Hesse, or the […]
My mom likes to tell a story about a letter she received from the state of California following her decision to keep me out of the public school system when I turned six years old, electing instead to become my teacher herself. She wrote to the education department requesting specific guidelines for keeping me on
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One always speaks badly when one has nothing to say. —Voltaire First World problems are things that bother people from wealthy countries that most Third Worlders would consider ridiculous. For instance, if you’ve been acting out over having to stand on public transportation, then you’re demonstrating a First World problem. If you just unfriended someone
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The Theravada Buddhist monk Ajahn Sona describes the mind as an untrained dog. You call it and it doesn’t pay attention. It wanders around and barks and scratches, and it’s completely unreceptive to your interaction, assuming you’ve actually gotten to the point where you can observe it instead of thinking that this untrained dog is
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I once helped build a cabin on the side of a 10,500 foot mountain. The only power tool we used was a 10” circular saw powered by a small generator. We cut the trench for the foundation footing out of the granite mountain side with picks, sledges, and a big cold chisel named Steely Dan
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“Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the
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