Crossing Nebraska

From That Which We Already Know . This passage is from Chapter Four of my forthcoming book. Included in the assortment of Christmas ornaments that my family unpacked each holiday season was a set of six sturdy aluminum foil snowflakes in those anodized metal colorings now so familiar to us all: blue, green, red, violet, silver, and gold. They unfolded from the flatness of their latent state into eight-pointed wonders for which I took personal responsibility. Perhaps because of their size—they were about as big around as dinner plates—they usually ended up becoming my personal bedroom decorations. I’d climb up on the stepladder and attach their strings to the plaster ceiling with asterisks of masking tape that occasionally required a supplemental strip or two over the course of the holiday season. Cover Artwork I liked to watch them as I fell asleep. They’d spin one way when the furnace kicked on and then gradually unwind once it kicked off again, over and over again. I recall my paren...

From That Which We Already Know . This passage is the introduction to my forthcoming book: The back gate of the very first home I ever knew opened onto a tract of land that I’ll not forget for as long as I may live. Ostensibly, it served as the nursery for nearby Gerhardt Gardens. By the time I arrived on the scene, however, the various plots of shrubs and saplings had become so overgrown as to seem more like wilderness to the child that I was. If not exactly wilderness, it was a crazy quilt of different habitats stitched together and overlaid with whatever weeds, grasses, and woodland succession plants happened to have put down roots and begun working their way toward the sun. Notwithstanding its state of near abandonment, we still referred to those 20-odd acres of beautiful wildness as the Nursery. If nothing else, it was a nursery for young minds. Cover Artwork A well-worn path headed east from that gate, through a dark patch of woods squeezed between the corrugated steel fence of a...

Sleeplessness can be a truly hellish thing. When is our existential predicament felt more profoundly than when we’re alone in the darkness, ensnared by our rumination, unable to escape into the glorious embrace of unconsciousness or even a pleasant thought or two? And, yet, just as an athlete trains under the worst conditions that they expect to encounter during a race or on game day, we might also come to appreciate our sleeplessness as a time of fruitful spiritual practice. For if we can learn to find peace in the depths of our darkest hours, then it is likely that we will be okay as soon as the first rays of morning light creep over the horizon. Now, despite what I just said about athletes training under adverse conditions, we needn’t go out of our way to make things harder on ourselves. In that regard, we’re well-served by knowing at least the basics of good sleep hygiene: Make your bedroom a place for sleeping – not reading or television watching or internet surfing. Be ...

Some years ago, I was challenged to explain climate change in fewer than 200 words. As both a writer and lover of all life on this earth I found the challenge intriguing. Here’s what I came up with: Plants “breathe in” carbon dioxide and “breathe out” oxygen. The carbon becomes part of the plant’s new growth and the oxygen benefits animal life as well. Over the course of millions of years, the accumulation of dead vegetation became the coal, oil, and natural gas fields that now fuel our modern lifestyle. Burning these “fossil fuels” takes oxygen out of today’s atmosphere and puts carbon dioxide back in. In just one hundred years we have largely reversed a natural process that was millions of years in the making. Carbon dioxide is a “ greenhouse gas ”. It traps heat in the atmosphere and causes the earth’s average temperature to rise. This warming has taken place so quickly that it is disrupting weather patterns and making storms and droughts more severe. It is changing regional clim...

You will likely recall that the last of the Four Noble Truths points to the path leading to the cessation of suffering – the Noble Eightfold Path . You might also recall that the three “steps” along that Path referred to as right speech , right action , and right livelihood pertain to moral conduct , whereas the others pertain to either wisdom or meditation , as the case may be. Implicit, then, within the practice of Buddhism, is the understanding that the cessation of “our” suffering is only possible within the context of our relationship with “others” and the world. One simple way to think of how these steps of the Path might link together is to consider how difficult it is to act morally without at least a little bit of wisdom guiding our behavior. Likewise, it is difficult to settle deeply into meditation when our life is fraught with conflict due to the improper nature of our conduct. Furthermore, without the ability to settle deeply into the stillness of meditation our ...

I suspect that anyone who’s lived an appreciable number of years will have come to know that darkest of places that we can know – with life as we’ve known it but a fast-fading memory, and life as we think it will be forevermore seeming like the darkest, coldest hell that can ever be imagined. Do you know this place of which I speak – the Void ? I was still a teenager when I first encountered it. Whatever Christian faith I’d known up to that point had crumbled and I’d not yet cultivated much of anything to take its place. In that place of in-betweenness was everything abhorrent to the human mind: meaninglessness, aloneness, joylessness… Some might be quick to refer to such an experience as “ the dark night of the soul ”; but to label it as such is at once to minimize it. For to assume that one’s soul is experiencing some tribulation that will eventually bring it closer to God, or to oneness, or to whatever it is that one might still believe in is to presume that there is ...

Alan Watts , erstwhile Episcopal priest and Buddhist scholar, died at the relatively young age of 58, prior to ever seeing the Buddhist teachings that he helped disseminate in the West reach the level of acceptance and maturity that we know them to have today. I have the sense that people of about my chronological age represent the last generation of spiritual explorers to see his writings on bookstore shelves with any regularity. Regardless of your familiarity with Watts, however, you will almost certainly enjoy a very delightful, and delightfully animated, lecture snippet of his referred to as The Earth is People-ing (animated by Chris Brion and Todd Benson). The Earth is People-ing challenges us to move beyond our usual way of thinking about the arrival of intelligent life here on earth in order to reflect upon the possibility that the intelligence that resides in people is actually a manifestation OF the Earth and not merely a characteristic of the beings that...