Growing up in the 1960’s, one generation removed, World War II deeply informed my sense of both past and present. My father and almost all the men of his generation had signed up or were drafted. It was just the thing to do, whether it was to go and fight Nazis or because they realized the neighborhood corner was empty so they might as well go off to where their buddies were. They were spread out from England to France to Burma to New Guinea. Some guarded prisoners, some worked on intelligence, some were on aircraft carriers, and some stormed the beaches of northern France on D-Day.Read the rest of this entry »
A few sniffles and a light cough were the first signs. And the fact that my wife had tested positive the day before, as did her friend who sat with us at my show last Friday. With a full day of patients, it was time to test. Ah…the double blue lines; the mark of Covid! Round two!!Read the rest of this entry »
The world has gone mad. The cloud of nuclear Armageddon hangs over us all as war rages on in Ukraine; systemic oppression, locally and globally, can no longer be hidden or denied. Hate, fear and anger have metastasized through our social and political bodies.
It is ego run amok, as politicians the world over vie for power; egos doing anything they can to insure their own survival, operating under the illusion of solidity and permanence, careening toward destruction, willing to take the rest of us along for their deadly ride.
The world cries out for healing; for medicines that can help to lift the veil that has clouded our vision, to reveal our true natures, our energetic connection with all beings, with the cosmos itself; to remind us that what happens anywhere effects what happens everywhere.Read the rest of this entry »
Or have we become so polarized, so isolated in our social media bubbles, that we will maintain the “righteousness” of our positions–bolstered by reams of “evidence,”–forever.
We on the left like to believe that we have sole access to the truth; that it is only the “other side” that wanders in the desert of “alternative facts.” Of course, the other side feels exactly the same way.
There are at least two types of journalism. There is the classic detached, distanced, “objective” journalism. And then there is “Gonzo” journalism; most notably practiced by the likes of Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. In this style, there is no need for distance; rather, the journalist is fully immersed in the story and reports it from the inside.
Aya: Awakenings is the story of gonzo journalist Rak Razam. In 2006, Razam was on assignment for Australian Penthouse magazine to report on an ayahuasca conference taking place in the city of Iquitos, Peru, in the Peruvian Amazon.Read the rest of this entry »
We are daughters and sons, mothers and fathers; we are our jobs, our homes, our educations, our nationalities; we are our ethnicities.
We travel through life attached to these identities; composites built, brick by brick, with the answers to these questions.
These identities are not just useful, but necessary. With the recognition that we have a self that is separate from the world around us, we can divide our experience into “I” and “it,” subject and object, reducing the external world into pieces to be taken apart and put back together again. Our sense of self– of separateness–enables us to navigate the vicissitudes of life.
COVID intruded into our world last Winter, then raged through the Spring and Summer of 2020. After taking a small break in the Fall, it exploded again–predictably–on the heels of reckless Thanksgiving and Christmas travel.
