Love is the life you already have. What does this mean? If you are reading this then you are human. You already have the precious gift of having been born as a human being. You might have been many other kinds of being. You might not have been animat
Read more…Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar has many memorable lines, but none more so than “Beware the Ides of March.” As it is, today, the 15th of March, I would like to highlight one of the most important themes of the play, which is the dilemma of Brutus.
An
The Book of Jonah (referred to in the Daily of yesterday) is one of the shortest in the Old Testament - just four chapters. It tells the tale of a man who is given a job to do by his god but does not want to do it. It is therefore about avoiding one’
Read more…If you are reading this it might be that you live in a country torn by war and devastation and the Spirit may then be your lifeline, but, given that you do have time to read, it is more likely that you live in a country that is at peace, that is not
Read more…This morning we had a discussion about the passage in the Bible in Genesis chapter 11 which is the story of the Tower of Babel. The story is simple enough. The people of the Earth gather and meet in harmony and set to work to build a city and a tower
Read more…Many Modes of Spirituality
The contemporary world is such a confusing place. We have available to us a greater plethora of ideas than perhaps any previous age. The spiritual treasures of the whole world and much of history are spilled out at our feet
Living Together
A community is a group of people living together. There might be many reasons why people might live together. Humans are moderately social animals. There are advantages in living together, but there are also problems. A group living t
In de uiteenzetting van gisteren keken we naar het emoticon beeld van vrede, een duif met een olijftak in de snavel. In de oude Griekse mythologie waren de duif en de olijftak attributen van Eirene de godin van de vrede. De olijf werd ook geassociee
Read more…Translation, notes and metrical explanation copyright 1997 Elizabeth Vandiver; all rights reserved.
Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don't--I beg you, Lady--with pains and torments
Crush down m
If there anyone I envy,
it’s old Diogenes, dog that he was
and I more a cat.
But… Oh to be in a world
where such naturalness
was possible!
I hope we have a few sparks in common.
Like that honest man, I am a citizen
of nowhere in particular.
Which polis? “Co
I've been reading The Bacchae by Euripedes. It is the only extant play based on the rituals of Dionysus in which women went in groups into the hills and engaged in orgiastic activities under the influence of wine. The theme of the play is the punishm
Read more…I have started rereading the book Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle’s Dialectical Pedagogy”. I shall not give an account of the book, merely of some of the stimulating ideas that he advances or that occur to myself as I read it.
1. Since Plato never speaks
In the teaching yesterday we looked at the emoticon image for peace, being a dove with an olive sprig in its beak. In ancient Greek mythology, the dove and the olive branch were attributes of Eirene the goddess of peace. The olive was also associated
Read more…In the practice of spirituality, there is always an interesting tension between form and spontaneity. Too much form can easily become empty hypocrisy whereas too much spontaneity can easily become self-indulgence and dilettantism. The sage Kuya once
Read more…Faith is Part of What We Are
Spirituality requires us to have faith in faith. This faith-in-faith is well-founded because without faith we could do almost nothing and we would certainly be a great deal the less. We have to have faith in faith. On the
The conclusion I have reached and that serves me best is that the basic default setting of life is faith. The snail proceeding across the garden lives in faith that she will reach the cabbage. It may be that all manner of misfortune may prevent her d
Read more…I have recently been reading Winnie the Pooh and, among other things, it is a wonderful account of everyday small mindedness. Pooh is the personification of greed. If the chance of getting "a little something" comes along he immediately becomes obliv
Read more…This evening I lit a fire for Artemis. She is the goddess of wild things. On our land she has dedicated to her the most wild part, the forest area including 'the Enchanted Wood'. There is something unreachable about Artemis - especially if you are a
Read more…It is good to pray. There are many ways and many meanings and I shall describe a few. When you organise your living quarters, make sure you include a place for holy things. When you arrange your garden, create places for contemplation that are inviti
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