This is a story about our month in Florida.  We decided that our winter break from the cold needed to be someplace we could drive to, since getting on and off an airplane has proved pretty difficult and we need our wheelchair accessible van to get around.  So we drove to Naples, FL where we rented a small house for the month of February.

The drive down was uneventful (thank goodness) and we took our time.  Finding wheelchair accessible rest stops has become my new hobby.  We booked accessible hotels one day in advance and it worked out.

One night we spent at Jekyl Island, GA where we had spent many spring vacations with the kids, my brother and my parents.   Phyl recalled the beach where Jake took off on a wind surfer and couldn’t turn around.  John swam out to “save” him and they both had to be towed back by a local fisherman.  And there was the beach were Jeremy lost his beloved toy train “Percy” in the sand – which Phyl says is still out there!  And another beach where John and his Dad Continue reading An update on Phyl (from Florida) →

In a recent episode of the TV series The Crown, Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Phillip, had a brief conversation with his mother Princess Alice of Battenberg, who asked him casually “so how is your faith?”  After a slight hesitation he replied, “dormant.”   The aging Princess told her middle aged son bluntly….  “That’s not good, let this be a mothers gift to her child … find yourself faith, it helps, no… not just helps … its everything.”

It is easy to imagine why the husband of the Queen of England might find himself too busy to worry about his faith… too busy to “bother with God.”  After all, there are all those royal ceremonies to attend!  But what about you and me?  Why and when did we let a sense of the divine, the spiritual or the sacred slip out of our lives?  Or maybe we are hard core materialists (if you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist) and have never had any sense of the spiritual in the first place?  If so, you would not be all that unusual in the secular world in which we live today.  Most of us today don’t “bother with God.”

Continue reading Why I bother with God…. →

FROM: Lab Girl (pp. 3-4) by Hope Jahren. Knopf Doubleday Publishing

PEOPLE LOVE THE OCEAN. People are always asking me why I don’t study the ocean, because, after all, I live in Hawaii. I tell them that it’s because the ocean is a lonely, empty place. There is six hundred times more life on land than there is in the ocean, and this fact mostly comes down to plants. The average ocean plant is one cell that lives for about twenty days. The average land plant is a two-ton tree that lives for more than one hundred years. The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand. Plant numbers are staggering: there are eighty billion trees just within the protected forests of the western United States. The ratio of trees to people in America is well over two hundred. As a rule, people live among plants but they don’t really see them. Since I’ve discovered these numbers, I can see little else.

So humor me for a minute, and look out your window. Continue reading Want to be a plant scientist? Look at a leaf… →

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn’t heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore’s house. Inside the house was Eeyore.

“Hello Eeyore,” said Pooh.

“Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet” said Eeyore, in a Glum sounding voice.

“We just thought we’d check on you,” said Piglet, “because we hadn’t heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay.”

Eeyore was silent for a moment. “Am I okay?” he asked, eventually. “Well, I don’t know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That’s what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All.

Which is why I haven’t bothered you. Because you wouldn’t want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now.”

Pooh looked and Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.

Eeyore looked at them in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“We’re sitting here with you,” said Pooh, “because we are your friends. And true friends don’t care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are.”

“Oh,” said Eeyore. “Oh.” And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better.

Because Pooh and Piglet were There.

No more; no less.

Author – AA Milne

Illustration – EH Shepard

 Ilia Delio

Non-duality is the belief that entities do not exist in opposition to one another or separate from one another.  Non-dualism is another name for unity.  The concept of non-duality is ancient and arose with Eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism and the primacy of pure consciousness. Quantum physics has opened up a new interest in non-duality in so far as consciousness plays an active role in measurement and thus in the description of reality.  The physicist David Bohm developed a theory of implicate order based on quantum physics to describe a wholeness in nature. He once said that if our eyes had no lenses, the entire universe would appear as a hologram. Even on the level of biology, we are beginning to realize that wholeness and non-duality comprise nature. Harold Bloom in his book The Global Brain describes the network of life on Earth as one that is a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious role.    Arthur Koestler proposed the word holon to describe the hybrid nature of sub-wholes and parts within in vivo systems. A holon is something that is simultaneously a whole and part.^[i] From this perspective, holons exist simultaneously Continue reading Non-duality and Cosmic/Christ/Unity Consciousness →

FROM Phaedo in Plato’s Dialogues

Just hours before Socrates drank the poison that resulted in his death, his friend Crito asked him;

 “…in what way would you have us bury you?“

Socrates replied;

“…be of good cheer… my dear Crito;

and say that you are burying my body only,

and do with that as is usual, 

and as you think best.”  

Socrates was able to consume the hemlock that killed him in a calm and peaceful manner, while urging his students and friends to “be of good cheer”.  Socrates was ready for death to take his physical body and indeed he was an active participant in his own passing.  Most of us are not quite so well prepared.

This past year has been one in which several people I know well have died.  I’ve been Continue reading A Socratic Dialogue on Dying… →