Basic Necessities
On this anniversary of an event that shook the world, I think about basic necessities. Not so much the lovely gourmet wine, bread and cheese bistro of which I have written previously but medieval peasantry basics: food, warmth and cleanliness. How easy to forget...
Restlessness
Completing a months-long project, meeting a difficult goal, walking out of a final exam, filing a major brief, an institution-wide evaluation or a huge end-of-the-year report, and you feel elated, yahoo, relieved, whew, right? Not me, unless you include tired,...
Moving Rocks and Planting Seeds
This past weekend at Vanaprastha, rain gently soaked the mountain landscape. Water dripped off gable ends, travelled through gutters and drainpipes and coursed down ditches along the driveway. During downpours, gullies also appeared, moving organic debris, soil and...
Right and Busy
How to grow up in one piece, a 40-page book of quirky advice about people and everyday things, is one of my all-time favorite books. Read by adults but written as if for the uninitiated, that is, for children, Robert Paul Smith’s humor permeated my youth in the...
Are you liberated?
One chilly winter night some forty years ago during my college years, I was upstairs in a Boston dance club on Beacon Street looking around for someone I’d like to ask me to dance. Two young, strapping fellows about my age promptly swam into view, approaching...