In catching up on the news today, I came across a pagan article titled “Who Would the Goddess Vote For?” Because I think it’s a little closer to our collective cultural understanding, I’d like to change the question to How Would Jesus Vote? The CA primaries are over, so I’m a little more interested in […]

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Happy Hallowe’en, everyone! One of the dominant themes of the holiday is to turn the scary into something safe. Often this is done by turning the scary into the funny or the cute: dressing children up like ghosts or monsters. Sometimes this is done by inuring ourselves to the scary by participating in it in a safe way: watching scary movies that we can turn off or walk away from.

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I had occasion, a long time ago, to drive to Santa Barbara with a friend. We had our iPods (of course!) and traded off driving and DJing. And we both sang along with the music. Halfway there, I realized that my husband rarely sings along. This struck me, because, I am self conscious about singing along to music in the car, but only when there are other (strange) people around. By myself or with my husband: not so much. After I mentioned this to him, he started tentatively singing along with songs he knows.

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It looks like I’m fighting a GI virus, so it may seem ironic for me to propose a food-related challenge. The (wanting to succumb to) death part fits though.

I had a little glimpse into chef culture today, thanks to Melanie Dunea’s My Last Supper: 50 Great Chefs and Their Final Meals. Apparently chefs have been asking one another for ages, “What would you like to eat for your last meal on earth?”

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Living in LA, by most counts a hotbed of liberalism, I often feel rather conservative. I’m married, heterosexual, and I’ve never been on TV, nor have I such a desire. But in the few days I spent this weekend in Oklahoma City, I feel very much the liberal.

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I’d often heard that the lotus flower symbolizes the enlightenment of a human mind. The seed (a person), planted into the murky depths of mud and water (this world), after striving towards the light it can barely sense from the bottom (meditation, living life), blooms into a […]

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One of the oldest “sciences” in the world is astrology. It operates on the principle of “as above, so below”, which is to say that the movements of the heavens affect the movements of people here on earth. The majority of it is probably bunk, but sometimes it’s fun to read a horoscope and laugh […]

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Most Western showers (at a length of about 10 minutes) waste 60 gallons of clean, potable water. [I have no idea where that number came from or how accurate it might be.] In contrast, a “Navy shower” can use as little as 3 (I’m sure I use more than that when I do it). Although […]

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I was listening to Gimon& Sarfunkle recently and one of my favorite songs came on:
Old friends, old friends:
Sat on their park bench like bookends.
A newspaper blown through the grass
Falls on the round toes
Of the high shoes
of the old friends.
Old friends, winter companions, the old men
Lost in their overcoats, waiting for the sun.
The sounds of the […]

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“We are surrounded by beauty,” I read somewhere recently (I think it was Rumi, but I can’t find substantiation for that), “Sometimes we just have to be in a garden to see it.”
I thought of this as I sat, tea in hand, cats on either side, looking out my front door at a concrete courtyard, […]

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