May 2023

  Ram Dass played a big part in my life. In 1967, when I was a senior at UC Santa Barbara, I heard Richard Alpert talk, and I remember it well. I had read and followed the guidance of The Psychedelic Experience, based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, the book Alpert wrote with Timothy […]

On my first trip to Ireland in 2007 with my husband John, I read Thomas Cahill’s now-classic book How the Irish Saved Civilization, in which he describes the essential role of the Irish monks and their work on illuminating manuscripts during the Dark Ages. I was captivated especially by the idea that Ireland was outside the

“The quality of true genius is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously without losing your mind.” —Charles Baudelaire I’m a photographer. I‘ve been looking through the lens of a camera for fifty years, and through its tiny aperture, I find myself wherever I look. Images are my currency. They tell me everything I need to know.

“How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice-masters.” — Thomas Merton, The Sign of Jonas Thomas Merton, the 20th century Trappist monk, knew that the true mentor of the soul was nature itself. The fields,

Every art form has its basics—those fundamental principles, forms, or techniques that must be set in place before you can learn the finer points of the craft. Watch children in any beginning ballet class, and you’ll see them learning the same five positions. Art classes the world over invariably begin with the line. Haiku also

I have a confession to make that may not go down well in official haiku circles, but I can’t hold it in any longer. It has been fifty years since I first read Bashō’s little poem about the frog jumping into the old pond with a plop!—and I still don’t get it. Not that I