Cosmic Reflections

Peace does not mean appeasing those powers that perpetuate social injustices and environmental degradation. Rather, peace means nonviolently but actively confronting all such institutionalized principalities. And for inspiration and guidance on how to do just that, I turn to the wisdom in my own faith tradition of Unitarian Universalism, and I begin with Ralph Waldo […]

Approaching the solstice, we make our way to a nearby field of stubble, bottles of water and a trowel stashed in Milt’s backpack. Weeks earlier, this spot had been as a lush meadow, refulgent with wildflowers. Vivid red Indian Paintbrush spread like wildfire across the whole area. And that was the problem, of course: this […]

The Sandy Hook school shooting so undid me that I frantically started knitting. I gathered up all the yarn left over from previous projects and began making child-sized scarves. I didn’t know what else to do in the face of such tragedy. Of course I signed every on-line petition that called for dealing with the […]

Out for my morning walk before dawn in order to beat the heat, I make my way through my Sun City, Summerlin, neighborhood. At the bottom of my street, I follow a glistening rivulet of water running in the gutter for three long blocks to its source: it is coming off a plot of lush […]

Like the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, I too studied the works of Ayn Rand in my youth. I read all her books, took courses on her philosophy, attended workshops around her ideas; I even heard her lecture in person in Boston in 1968. Unlike Paul Ryan, however, I outgrew Rand’s rigid world-view before I turned […]

Awakening in the pre-dawn of another Groundhog’s Day, I find myself wondering what’s the matter with ‘we the people’ on the North American Plate of Planet Earth?! We have just lived through the second warmest January ever recorded and are jokingly renaming it June-uary! Here in the Mojave Desert, where summer temps have gone from […]

While driving back to Vegas after spending Christmas in Denver, Milt and I talked about how to understand the Deep Time of our planet and our human place within it. In the fourteen hours of travel time, here’s what we came up with: We’d use the human body as a measure of all of Earth’s […]

My most pertinent personal experience with corporate greed and arrogance came to pass compliments of Wells Fargo. Mind you, I never even negotiated my 30 year fixed rate mortgage with Wells Fargo in the first place. Rather, it was sold to them without my knowledge, or consent. When I lost my professional income within the […]