Grasslands National Park in southern Saskatchewan is an amazing place. It is natural shortgrass prairie and home to all kinds of interesting plants and animals. Over the course of three days there in 1994, we saw badgers, mule deer, pronghorn antelope, burrowing owls, ferringous hawks, black tailed prairie dogs, rattlesnakes, and red foxes. We saw teepee rings on the top of bald buttes, unused for maybe 100 years, but each stone cast off the bottom of a skin teepee and gently placed in a ring for another time. We saw buffalo stones; huge erratic boulders rubbed smooth by centuries of …
Article: Breathing is Meaning In an analysis of the physical components necessary for sound production – power source, oscillator, resonator – breath occupies the most active place in human vocal production: it is the energy impulse that excites the vibration in the vocal folds and the resulting resonance in the body – starting, continuing, and stopping it. Because of the living and therefore infinitely changeable quality of the particular actions and structures that are responsible for this sound vibration, the way in which the human body breathes impacts the voice a great deal, much as the hands of a good …
Happy New Year. We are poised on the edge of the millennium – ruin behind us, no map before us, the taste of fear sharp on our tongues. Yet we will leap. The exercise of imagining is an act of creation. The act of creation is an exercise of will. All this is political. And possible. Bread. A Clean Sky. Active peace. A woman’s voice singing somewhere, melody drifting like smoke from the cookfires. The army disbanded, the harvest abundant. The wound healed, the child wanted, the prisoner freed, the body’s integrity honored, the lover returned. The magical skill that …
Entropy Gradient Reversals – Faster Horses! Sigh Consulting. Man, what a racket. Why didn’t I figure this out years ago? But I almost feel unclean for doing it. I almost feel guilty. Not for taking their money. That’s just manifest destiny. No, sometimes I feel terrible because I think maybe I really am helping these clueless fuckers to rape the rest of us. Giving them some empty-headed motivational excuse to weld all that avarice into an effective weapon that will make us all salivate for spiffier software or snappier net connections or the latest breakfast cereal breakthrough. But what have …
The Seven Points of Mind Training This website contains a database of commentaries on the Seven Points of Mind Training. The core practice involves taking on others’ sorrow and pain and sending them your joy; not as a masochistic practice but with the aim of getting away from the self-centeredness and self-seeking that cause us so much pain. These practices were brought to Tibet in the eleventh century by the Indian Buddhist teacher Atisha. The Seven Points consist of 57 proverbs divided by subject into seven sections. This site contains commentaries by five teachers. Access commentaries by clicking on the …