72 Hours in Geneva
*An experiment with a comprehensive (perhaps pedantically so) narration style.* Part 1 My alarm wakes me up at three on a Monday morning in April. My flight to Geneva is at six. The airport, luckily, is only about ten minutes away. I’ve ordered a taxi to pick me up at four, on the street below…
Returning Home
Adrian sat in a small community library on a rainy day in April, in Valencia. In a few weeks, after 8 months abroad, he’d be returning home. He’d left the U.S. with great aspirations. Inspired by spiritual literature, he’d wanted to train as an ascetic, to live without creature comforts and without a backup plan.…
Reflecting on nostalgia in a laundromat on a rainy afternoon
I’ve been in Granada, Spain for a little over a week. The idea of this city has been a conspicuous presence in my imagination for quite a while. The last stronghold of the Mores, the home of Sufi poets and Islamic philosophers of the middle ages, the starting point for Leo Africanus’ colorful adventures, etc……
I don’t feel ready to give up the intellectual life
“Ordinary people look outwards whilst followers of the Way look into their own minds, but the real Dharma is to forget both the external and the internal. The former is easy enough, the latter very difficult. Humans are afraid to forget their own minds, fearing to fall through the void with nothing to which they…
Annoyance with the “CH” sound in Mexican Spanish
I confess it. For whatever reason, I can’t help but be a little bit annoyed with the amount I’ve heard the “CH” phoneme (pronounced tch) in Mexican Spanish. In case you need a refresher, a phoneme is a building block of sound we use to make up a language. The amount of phonemes in any…
Three encounters with a teaching story
In the Fall of 2019 I read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho for the first time. I was living in Oregon and working as a psychiatric pharmacist at a mental health and drug rehabilitation facility. A colleague – a psychologist – had recommended the book to me a year earlier. We’d been eating together and…
Some reflections and encouragement for the idealistic spiritual seeker (myself)
“A mind burdened with knowledge cannot possibly understand, surely, that which is real, which is not measurable.” In “I Am That – Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj,” questioners are advised to cease from erudition, to be quiet, and to live their life remembering as often as possible simply to observe the background sense ‘I am.’…
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Always at the Beginning 