Author: brian

 March 7, 2013  So, who’s the cute little teddy-robot, and how did he lose his head? Well, if you follow APOD, then you know that this is an electron micrograph of a tardigrade, or water bear — that is, a living creature on this living Earth. This one was observed on a piece of moss. The…

December 25, 2012 It has been, in many respects, a year of night. No doubt our human species has had its share of it at large — unceasing and expanding war, recession, and our continuing ignorance of the environmental destruction that could fatally undermine the habitability of our planetary home by the end of this…

 May 5, 2014  Whenever I read over some of the content I post here, it occurs to me that I frequently fail to follow my own best advice. But any teacher or pundit or writer worth his salt should be able to make that admission; and those who don’t are to be given a wide…

 May 1, 2014  I am drawn toward the invisible realm, toward the quantum reality that lives beneath the appearances amid which we strive and struggle. True, I play the game: work, money, human interaction. I go to meetings; try to pay enough attention to finance to get by; I follow the news and especially sports…

 February 8, 2014  When I was a boy, I loved recess. It was a break in the school day from the drudgery and oppressive silence of the classroom, a brief opening into noise and laughter and play. I suspect I did more real growing during recess than in any amount of time I spent in…

  August 15, 2012  I can recall sitting in a project meeting one day a few years ago. I was the Business Analyst, the fellow responsible for creating documentation that would become the “project book” — the functional, business-oriented, technical, and performance specifications or requirements for the application that was being developed for this project….

 April 1, 2014  Where, I wonder, does your body end? This is what the old Zen masters called a koan, one of those puzzles that can’t be held in the hand of Reason, any more than air or smoke can be gripped by the fist. The general, common sense answer would of course be: at…

 May 12, 2014  This is the kind of thing that can change your day and maybe — if you’re not careful, that is — even transform your life. Like all true art, it challenges, penetrates appearances, and calls upon what is true and universal within and among us all. Rumi was a great Persian poet and…

 April 18, 2015  The secret of the mountains is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no ‘meaning,’ they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a…

 February 3, 2012  I’m sitting on a horse, the wrong way (tail-facing). I am facing a woman who I don’t know well but have long loved, reaching to embrace her. As I hold her in my arms and feel her energy entering me, I feel the horse starting to move. The question arises: “can I…