A survey-taker asks me if I’m religious.  “No,” I say.  “So you don’t believe in God?”  “Of course I do,” I say.  “So you’re a non-religious believer?”  I suppose so, whatever that means. Without intending to, I seem to confound bureaucrats and pollsters. Much of the time I’m either all of the above or none [...]

Another personal favorite, this one of the Channel Islands off the coast of southern California. The three small islands in the foreground make up Anacapa, the large island behind it is Santa Cruz, and in the distance are Santa Rosa and San Miguel islands. The image was taken through the windshield of a Cessna on [...]

  To create real change, we have to “language” our message so it speaks to different value structures, says Ken Wilber in an interview in the latest issue of Ode Magazine. For example, when Al Gore speaks of global warming, he says that the entire world needs to change its behavior. “But he says so in [...]

After almost six years, I moved my office out of the old Lobero Building last week. I was astonished by the amount of stuff I’d accumulated during that time — the papers, yes, but especially the books. I receive a lot of review copies, but I’m also guilty of buying too many titles. It’s a tough [...]

In his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell observed that just as thought can corrupt language, so language can corrupt thought. “A bad usage can be spread by tradition and imitation,” he said, “even among people who should and do know better.” Academic prose is the most obvious example. Many scholarly books [...]

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the “Madonna painters” supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by [...]