Reflections on nature, culture & the inner life
May 30, 2018 Dear Commonweal Friends: I hope this Spring Letter finds you well. We live in unimaginable times. The forces working against freedom and the earth are global: climate change, war, terrorism, authoritarianism, and more. I return to the global challenge...
Dear New School Friends: My last posting to you March 12 was a working paper called Courage in Dark Times: Choosing Resilience in the Face of Global Systems Collapse. It was reprinted by the Health and Environmental Funders Network as a newsletter and on its website....
Choosing Resilience in the Face of Global Systems Collapse This is a working paper. It is in a period of rapid evolution as of 3/12/18. Comments are welcome, though I cannot respond personally to all. What Future? What does the future look like? We cannot know. To the...
I’m reading a slender volume by Claudio Narano—Ennea-Type Structures: Self Analysis for the Seeker. Naranjo is a Chilean psychiatrist, now in his 80s, who lives in Berkeley. He is a founding interpreter of the enneagram of personality. He was a close friend of Carlos...
Dear New School Friends: Thank you for being so generous in supporting The New School in 2017. We depend on you. You have been most generous. What can I say about the new year? The political drama continues, but the culture is responding. The #MeToo movement is an...
Dear New School Friends, We just completed our 197th Cancer Help Program. We will hold our 200th in April. Each time eight people show up from a cross the country -- and often around the world. Many have recurrent cancer. They come for many reasons. They come to find...
Dear Friends, The confluence of catastrophes that have been circling the globe has landed in Northern California with disastrous fire losses in Sonoma, Napa, and Mendocino Counties. Commonweal has many friends, Cancer Help Program alumni, staff, and board members in...
The Noise of Time is the title of a novel by Julian Barnes based on the life of the Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovitch. Here is the beginning of an elegant review in The Guardian: Julian Barnes’s last novel, the Man Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011),...
Dear New School Friends, A 79-foot young female blue whale washed up dead near Agate Beach in Bolinas on Friday, May 26. For our community, it was one of the most significant events in the 45 years I have lived here. A lot of us felt deep grief about her death -- she...
Friends: I am back in Paris at the end of this month-long European journey. I’ve also been in Brussels, Geneva, Cardiff, and Amsterdam. We’re working to promote trade treaties that protect people and planet. We are also working to preserve Europe’s unique...