Reflections on nature, culture & the inner life
The new year is a time for reflections and resolutions. What do we actually know? We know that the biological fabric of life on earth is unraveling. We know that we are so profoundly altering the conditions of life that no corner of the earth is untouched. We know...
Malcolm Margolin was born in a Jewish neighborhood in Dorchester outside Boston in 1940. He was a dreamy child with his nose always in a book. School bored him. A piercing intelligence pushed him forward. He graduated from Harvard, married his Radcliffe girlfriend,...
Do you know about the DIY Movement? The Maker Movement? The Great Re-Skilling Movement? If you are like me, these movements (DIY stands for "do it yourself") may at best be at the edge of awareness. I've come to know some remarkable young people in West Marin who...
I write from the town of Langley on Whidbey Island north of Seattle. I just attended the Third Winter Gathering at the Whidbey Institute. The Gathering is led by my long-time friends Rick Ingrasci and Peggy Taylor. Life partners, they have led the Summer Gathering at...
“The room was crackling with interest—did you feel it?” my friend Jan Broek asked me. I did. The occasion was a New School conversation with physicist Tom Nash about the nature of the universe. I expected an audience of ten—but forty New School friends showed up....
Some preliminary notes A friend suggested to me the other day that reverence might be at the heart of our work. She proposed that there is a relationship between reverence and resilience. I asked what she meant by reverence. She said that she meant reverence for life....
The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible. Albert Einstein A unifying theory of the universe is the holy grail of modern physics. Einstein sought but did not find it. The great Cambridge mathematician Stephen Hawking and CalTech...
THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The...
i am sitting here with kyra epstein who is tutoring me in wordpress. she just showed me how to link to the-new-school.org. you can also link to commonweal and to the collaborative on health and the environment. my first resposne to learning this is ambivalence. ...
Dear Friends: I've been writing to you repeatedly about life in the global polycrisis. We've played a small part in surfacing the concept of the polycrisis as a way of understanding our times. Briefly to recap: the polycrisis is the sum total of all the...