This must have been eight or ten years ago — It was after one of my Saturday night services at Albuquerque Center for Spiritual Living. I was going in multiple directions at once, trying to have three simultaneous conversations, and…
Sometimes I get into these discomforting little eddies of self-doubt. Rarely do I remain stuck there for too long, but whirling around in it I still get pretty dizzy. Everything seems like too much or not enough. Like I’m too…
Last weekend, Patty Stephens led a “Hymnprov” workshop, where a bunch of us talked and riffed and improvised for a couple of hours, and then emerged at the end with a groovy new song that we’d written together. We’ll sing…
I finally watched David Byrne’s American Utopia this week. And I’m so very glad I did! It has been in my queue for over a year (streaming on HBO/Max). Though I was intrigued and had heard that it was good,…
It’s easy to conclude that people are the problem. It sure looks like people are to blame for pretty much everything that ails us. People are responsible for all this political, economic, environmental, sociological, technological, religious mess. Greedy narcissists have…
PBS has an excellent, new, three-part documentary about the disco craze of the 1970s. It’s called “DISCO: Soundtrack of a Revolution.” I know that a lot of people have a negative knee-jerk reaction to the very thought of disco dancing…
The phrase “God the Father” makes me cringe a little bit. The Patriarchy, Authority, Judgment — it evokes all those things, and that’s just not how I prefer to think of Spirit anymore. I avoid the capitalized, masculine pronoun. Even…
Mom liked to tell this story about my father’s family. When my paternal grandparents, Raymond and Bertha Groves, decided to move from Wisconsin to upstate New York in the late 1920s, my grandfather consulted an agriculturalist from Cornell University to…
Everything feels like a bit of a scramble right now. That’s not a complaint, simply an observation. It’s definitely not all bad; in fact, some things are quite good. And it’s not even that I’m particularly overwhelmed right now, I…
A science article in The Atlantic a few months ago — “How Animals Perceive the World,” by Ed Yong — introduced me to a term I’d never heard before: Umwelt. Umwelt refers to the particular sensory “bubble” in which all…