Archive for the ‘General’ Category
I wrote this on the back of a menu in a restaurant in Montreal, for the open-stage night at the Gaia Gathering, a few days ago. Enjoy!
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
I’ve studied ancient knowledge, theoretical and practical
I wear these little glasses, and a pony-tail to tie my hair,
and also talk a lot of rot both all the time and everywhere.
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
My workshops at the festival are always billed as magical
And yet when you attend there are no rituals or jewelry
Instead you get a load of stuff so weird it must be mystery
I’ve stayed awake in lectures that a lesser man could not endure
I’ve reconstructed ancient ways, especially the most obscure
In short, in all the matters theoretical and practical
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual!
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
I talk of topics scientific, also philosophical
I have initiations from a modern university
And always post my essays on the internet for you to see.
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual
And yet you find me with my djembe drumming at the festival
I can raise a cone of magic power with most anyone
And then debate about the finer points until the morning sun
I can quote a thousand myths and legends from the ancient world
I wear a Goddess pendant in the hope it will impress a girl
In short, in all the matters theoretical and practical
I am the very model of a pagan intellectual!
A few days ago, I was going over some things in my notebooks which were originally cut from various past writing projects, to see if any of them can be rewritten, edited, or otherwise salvaged for future projects. Between two of my last three books, and the one I finished writing last month (to be released in 2012), there’s a consistency of interest. I tend to be writing about broadly similar problems and themes: environmental issues, political and social justice issues, the interpretation of mythology and history, the pursuit of a meaningful and worthwhile life. And I began to wonder if perhaps the cluster of ideas that I’ve been laying before the public in my book should be given a name.
Naming something doesn’t have to mean solidifying it into a ‘doctrine’ (in the pejorative sense of that word). But it can make the problems and themes under discussion, and the methods of investigating them, easier to identify. Symbols are helpful for this purpose too.
So while musing openly on FB about naming my work, a commentator (who found names for intellectual schools of thought a little tedious and boring) suggested that it might be better to first try and define it in one sentence.
This makes a lot of sense. A strong, precise, and recognizable one-sentence description may be more helpful than a mere name. The great world religions, for instance, even though they may have thousands of years of history and thousands of books of theology that one can study, certainly can be encapsulated in a single sentence formula. I’ve blogged about that before. Philosophers sometimes produce short, tract-length explanations of their ideas, so that interested people can then go and read the longer, book-length treatments. Sartre’s “Existentialism is a Humanism” comes to mind as an example.
So I looked over my books, my blog posts over the years, my song lyrics, some of the social or political causes I’ve supported, and the like, in search of a basic presupposition which, while perhaps not suppressed or unstated, nonetheless goes unquestioned. This is a basic philosophical procedure: in good intellectual work, no proposition is unstated, no presuppositions are left unexamined. Even the procedures of reason itself are subject to the critical scrutiny of reason, which sometimes ties us up in strange knots of apparently self-refuting logic, but there you have it anyway.
The way to do this kind of investigation is to see if there is any proposition which always serves as a starting-place, never as a finishing-place, in an argument about the highest and deepest things. If I hold some idea true because of some other idea also held to be true, then that idea isn’t yet the highest and deepest idea. My political commitments were thus ruled out. For although I’ve been fairly consistently left-wing for many years, I have those commitments because of another commitment, which is more important, more basic, more deeply held. It is the same for my involvement in my spiritual community: that involvement is also not an end-in-itself for me, but rather an enactment of a deeper commitment. And it is the same for my commitment to reason itself, which is more important to me than my political or spiritual commitments, and yet also based on a further, higher and deeper idea. What is that idea?
It is the idea that human life on earth is worthwhile, beautiful, deserving of celebration, and good.
There you have it: a one-sentence description of what my work is about. And yet this sentence is not enough. It prompts other questions: what is the source of that goodness? What is the evidence for it? How can one sustain this commitment even while the world is obviously home to drudgery, lies, bigotry, hatred, ugliness, and oppression? We might call this the problem of evil.
I have often argued in favour of this proposition by way of arguing against the alternative. The only logically consistent response to the alternative proposition, that human life is worthless, ugly, and meaningless, is nihilism, despair, and suicide. But this explains the basic proposition in the negative. We also need something positive.
I go back to my sources; I go back to the root of my mind; I look a little deeper. I find that another, related starting-place in my thinking is the proposition that the beauty and the goodness of life is not simply a truth that the world gives to you, and which you passively receive. It is, rather, a question to be answered, a project to be undertaken, and an achievement to be worked and struggled and adventured for. That question and that problem is placed before you whenever you encounter in your life a natural immensity.
The idea of an immensity haunts nearly every page of my last three books. It means a presence which seems, at least at first, to stand over you, as something inevitable and powerful, and which calls your life into question, yet which also invites a response. The four examples that I study are: the Earth, other people, death, and loneliness. These need not be the only immensities, but they seem the most important ones. There is no way to move through life without encountering these things. And yet while meeting them is a destiny for us all, there is nothing written in the stars about how that meeting must play out, and what its consequences must be.
With that in mind, let me revise the one-sentence description that I gave earlier. The basic proposition is that Human life is good, beautiful, and worthwhile, and that the goodness, beauty, and worth of life emerges when you have the right kind of relationship with the immensities.
This handles the objection raised earlier about the problem of evil. But it prompts new ones, especially: just what is the right kind of relationship with the immensities? Well, that very question is among the questions put before you by the Immensities themselves, and thus it must be answered by each person for herself. But I think I can say something about how to find an answer. An immensity is not a command to be obeyed: it is a presence to be experienced. Thus a relation with an immensity is also not a rule to follow. It is a presence to be revealed by one’s way of being in the world. Thus to find and create a worthwhile life, full of the beauty and goodness of things, one will have to investigate one’s various ways of being in the world. Some ways of being in the world lead to the experience that life is desirable and worthwhile. Some ways of being in the world lead to the experience that life is undesireable and worthless. Shades of grey may also be discerned in between these two poles. Each person must observe, study, and examine herself, to learn what ways of being in the world uplift her, and then adopt them. She must also learn what ways of being in the world oppress her, and then reject them. This is a process of self-discovery, self-transformation, and self-creation. It has personal, social, political, and environmental dimensions. Perhaps some day we shall discover it has cosmic, interstellar dimensions. And it need never be finished: it can carry on throughout one’s life.
This idea is perhaps not only my own. It appeared to me in a series of dreams back in October of 2003, in which I dreamed of a conversation with Herself about these and other matters. But I shall say no more of that right now.
I welcome thoughts, comments, and criticisms.
In our nation’s federal election campaign, I normally look at all the major parties, and give them a chance to reason with me, although I (normally) vote the way I voted last time. This time, when looking over some news related to the Conservative Party, I saw that Harper wants to create an Office of Religious Freedom.
Now, most Canadian politicians don’t talk about religion all that much. Harper himself, although he is an evangelical fundamentalist Christian, who regularly attended the Calgary based Alliance Church, doesn’t talk about religion all that much either.
But because he is an evangelical Christian, it is almost certain that when Stephen Harper thinks of religious minorities, he is thinking only of other Christians. It’s likely that his party members are thinking the same way: for example, our Minister for Science and Technology is a creationist and doesn’t believe in evolution. And Conservative incumbent candidate Brad Trost openly boasted of cutting funds to Planned Parenthood and re-opening the abortion debate in this country. (To be fair, Harper claimed he wouldn’t touch the issue if elected; I have my doubts about that too, but I will leave them aside for now.)
Christian communities in countries like Pakistan, Iran, China, and so on, probably do have a very hard time of things. But Christians are clearly not the only persecuted religious minorities in the world. And I’m skeptical about whether they are persecuted any more or less than other groups.
But given the Christian fundamentalism that dwells in the Reform Party’s agenda (pardon me, the Conservative Party’s agenda), therefore you can bet that this office will almost certainly not be used to help voudouisants in Africa, Tibetan Buddhists in China, Jews in Palestine or Muslims in Israel, or for that matter any religion at all which is not Christian.
The only exceptions, the only non-Christian religions which this office might support in other countries, would be religious communities that are wealthy and well-organized enough in Canada to pressure the government to help their co-religionists in other countries. A lot will depend on a given community’s lobbying power. Scientologists might claim that they are being persecuted in Germany, for instance, and demand the office’s help, and they are wealthy and well organized enough to do much better than other groups. Aboriginal people, for instance, who might want the government to help protect indigenous people in Africa from being burned alive as witches, will probably get no hearing at all.
(In case you don’t believe that it’s happening, here’s a video. Not for the squeamish.)
This notion of Christian persecution is a very old story. Christ himself spoke of it: cf. John 15:20 and Matt 24:9, for example. The work of researcher Elizabeth Castelli charts the “persecution complex” (her words) of modern day American evangelicals. As she describes them, Christians seem to like the idea that the world is against them, even when their communities are large, organized, wealthy, and politically powerful. But I’m a little tired of hearing this persecution story. And I don’t like the way it might creep into our national political culture if Harper wins the election.
I think we may need to ask ourselves if we want our tax money spent that way, and (more to the point) whether we want religious fanatics running our country.
If you agree with me, please:
- Share this blog post with your friends,
- In the comments field, list a religious minority somewhere in the world which you think might genuinely benefit from Harper’s proposed office, but which you think is likely to be overlooked by that office.
- Ask your local Conservative candidate about his religious views.
Hi everyone,
Well, the deadline for the “Loneliness and Revelation” contest was about a week and a half ago. All the contest entries are visible in the photo section of my Facebook “Fan” page.
I have to admit to a little embarrassment here. Yes, I was hoping that the contest would help improve the book’s visibility, and popularity, and also help to get people out of their shells and involved in their communities. But only two people entered the contest so far. The contest doesn’t seem to have worked, really.
So here’s an announcement: since I know a number of people who wanted to enter but haven’t yet because their copy of the book hasn’t arrived yet. So, I have decided to extend the deadline to Saturday, 30th April.
For a while I thought that only two people entered the contest because $100 is not enough incentive, given that the “price” of entry, the purchase of a copy of the book, is around $14 (US). Juniper pointed out to me that one reason people might not have wanted to enter the contest was because they may not have wanted to be photographed in association with a book by a pagan writer (even though the book itself is not really a pagan book). Well, if that’s true, then I suppose I owe just about everybody an apology. It isn’t my purpose to “out” anyone who doesn’t want to be outed.
But yes, I admit the purpose of the contest was also to increase the book’s visibility, popularity, and sales. But it’s not only about the money, for me. Even if the books sold a thousand copies per month, I would not be quitting my day job. It’s about the ideas that make the world go round; it’s about initiating a dialogue about important topics in our friendship circles and communities; it’s about directly addressing the most serious problems in our lives, and figuring out what to do about them. I’d like to help people that way, but to do that I need help too. So, if anyone has suggestions for other ways to promote the books, I’m all ears. 
…
Click here to find out more about “Loneliness and Revelation”, and to purchase your copy today!
This is a very short response to some criticisms directed at my essay “Thinking Shall Replace Killing”, published on Patheos.com back in February.
The first thing I’d like to remind critics of is the appearance of the word “short” in the title. It is neither a comprehensive nor an all-inclusive essay. It is barely an introduction to a complex and important topic. But accomplished some of its purpose, which was to get people to realize that there are alternative ways to think about spirituality and ethics besides divine command.
It may be worth observing that some of the text of this essay came, in part, from a larger and longer manuscript on ethics which will be published by O Books next year. Another recently published essay of mine, entitled “The Sacredness Between Us”, also comes from that manuscript.
I occasionally release portions of manuscripts like this in order to be able to assess reader interest, and also to consider objections and criticisms. Constructive criticism is extremely useful to a philosopher, and I am able to improve the quality of my writing when I receive good quality constructive criticism from well-wishing but critical readers. Indeed I see this as an important part of what it is to be a public intellectual. I participate in the same community as my readers do; I am involved in a conversation with them. When I publish an entire book-length treatment of a topic like this one, it will be of much better quality because of that conversation.
But back to the point. Among all the various criticisms, two stand out in my mind, because they were mentioned by several critics, not just one or two. I’ll address them here.
One had to do with the historical discussion of the moral principle that “thinking shall replace killing”. Some critics called it “absurd at face value”. Some said I was romanticizing history, trying to make warlike pagans look like “love, light, and faery dust kinda folk”. Some questioned whether I had actually studied any history at all. These are not criticisms: they are just statements, and I feel perfectly at ease ignoring them.
But a more substantial criticisms along these lines went like this. Polytheistic societies were very capable of killing, and frequently indulged in killing, when they felt they needed to kill. Even while Pericles was shaping Athens into a centre of culture, so he was also shaping Athens into an imperial power, perfectly capable of conquering and oppressing other cultures. Surely that is contrary to the argument that thinking was replacing killing as a social force.
Now that is what an interesting, substantial, and useful criticism looks like.
In reply, may I suggest the following. My essay is not a political or economic history. It is an intellectual history; it is a very short look at the history of the idea that thinking is ethically better than killing. It is possible that certain critics, not seeing that distinction between intellectual history and political/economic history, concluded that I was making a point about the latter and not the former – a point which, were that the case, would be easily refuted by the facts. But I am, indeed, aware of the facts: they are implied in the essay with statements like this one:
“Athens, in the time of Pericles, became a society in which artistic and intellectual activity became at least as culturally important as military victory”,
and this one:
“In this change, I’m sure that the Celtic people did not cease to be a warrior people. But I think they also began to recognize other values, such as art, justice, and peace.”
None of these statements admit of the hard, fast, and absolute dichotomy between thinking and killing that some critics attribute to me. (Indeed I am reminded of Isaac Bonewits, who might have said that there is a dualism presupposed in the criticism – and isn’t it dualism which causes all the trouble?) The criticism is thus a straw man.
But does not the statement “thinking shall replace killing” read as a dichotomy between thinking and killing? Why use a statement with that dichotomy apparently built right into it, if that is not what was intended? I retained the statement from Deganawidah, as a moral claim (not an historical claim), because I find it artistically appealing as well as ethically profound and correct. Thinking about our problems, talking about them, reasoning about them, disagreeing peacefully, and arriving at solutions via consensus and dialogue, really is ethically better than solving our problems with force majeure. And there really is a logical disjunction between expressing oneself with words, and expressing oneself with murderous violence. I tip my hat to phenomenologists like Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, and Paul Ricoeur. But perhaps this essay of mine was not clear enough to get the point across. My writing, then, will have to improve.
Another criticism had to do with what might be called the essay’s implicit Goddess essentialism. In the second half or so, the essay describes “the culture of the Goddess”, as contrasted against the legalistic culture of the patriarchal monotheist god of the Abrahamic tradition. To which some critics thought: is he just substituting one monotheism for another? Which goddess does he mean there? Well, on one level these criticisms are just expressions of annoyance that I did not follow the polytheist party line. Let me remind everyone, then, that I’m under no obligation to toe anybody’s party line. But on another, more serious level, these criticisms call for more clarity, and that is also an excellent and fair criticism.
When, in that essay, I spoke of “the culture of the goddess”, what I had in mind was this:
“…a society that affords real priority to the goddess, and to her way of presenting the revelation of her divine presence, is likely to be a society where the values are cast not as rules or laws. It is likely to be a society in which the values are cast in the form of character-virtues. I think this is so because her message is not a commandment to be obeyed: her message is a presence to be experienced. Her message tells us who she is, not what to do.”
And this is contrasted with the way God appears in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam:
“…the presence and the revelation of God, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, establishes a social and political order.”
That statement about the moral difference between the Abrahamic and the Pagan point of view is one of the most important steps in the essay, as I see it. Worrying about the name I assigned to this way of thinking, and what it might imply, seems to me a red herring. All I would have to do to respond to the criticism is change the name of the argument into something that would draw attention to the logic of the argument itself instead of to its superficial packaging.
Well, I probably will change that name, for the sake of clarity. But let’s keep our eyes on the ball. For what is at stake here is something much more than a name. What is at stake is the quality of our lives. Indeed the problem is not really whether a religion is monotheist or polytheist. The problem is not even whether a religion is legalist in nature, as I characterized the Judeo-Christian tradition. The problem, let us remember, is oppression. Legalist religions tend to be much more susceptible to oppress people than other kinds of religion. But whether a given religion is legalist or not, we should reject any part of it that would rather frighten people into submission than reason with them or inspire them. We should declare, as the Sufi mystic Rabi’a al-Adawiya declared:
I want to pour water into hell and set fire to paradise so that these two veils disappear and no one worships God out of fear of hell or in hope of paradise but just for the sake of his own eternal beauty.
Legalist religion tends to be more subject to fear than animism, or theism, or any shade of –ism in between. But we are not necessarily looking to dispense with legalist religion, nor for that matter with religion as such. We are looking for ways to dispel fear, with all of its attendant suffering, and we are looking for ways to create meaningful and worthwhile lives.
Let’s not lose sight of that, please.
Making short promotional videos is fun. For this one, instead of using nothing but still photos, I also used some very short clips from various video sources, so it can look a little bit more like a “movie” trailer.
The four statements in the video are the four elementary “movements” of Revelation; they are, as the book describes, the four basic existential moments in which meaningful relationships and worthwhile lives are created.
Most images here refer to ideas described in the text; but for the most part I designed this video to express a little bit of what it felt like to write the book, and what I hope it might feel like to read it.
Following up from the last post:
Notwithstanding the protests against public service budget cuts in various American states, notably Wisconsin, I think that a movement for democracy like the one in the Arab world is very unlikely in the Western world. There are several reasons why I think this.
One is that we believe we already have democracy. We have a vote; we have a multi-party system; we have a free media and free markets; and for many people, that’s all the democracy we need.
Another is that too many people are apathetic about politics: they think that nothing anyone could do will change anything. (I know lots of people who, for reasons like that, don’t vote). Or, they care more about the price of gas, and the price of imported consumer goods like clothes and cellphones, than they do about the way indentured labour in foreign countries keep those consumer goods cheap. Or, in their apathy they simply don’t care enough about social justice or the suffering of other people to do anything about it.
A third is that lots of people here believe in values that separate rather than unite people, such as competition. Too many people believe that the poor and oppressed are lazy, wasteful, incompetent, or stupid, and therefore deserve their poverty. The libertarian point of view, expressed for instance in John Hospers’ Libertarian Manifesto, is that if someone else’s misfortune is not your fault, then you don’t have to do anything about it if you don’t want to. You don’t have to share your food with the starving, if you don’t want to: and this, according to libertarians, is freedom.
Overall, not enough of us treat the values of humanity, like friendship and love and care, as universal values. Not enough of us treat the values of integrity, like dignity and trust and courage, as universal values. Not enough of us have a sense of wonder, by which we can see the good in things, or imagine life as different than it is.
So, in addition to a fear barrier, we may also have an apathy barrier. Readers, I invite your comments on this thought.
We’ve been told for over a decade now that Arabs, and Muslims generally, are all terrorists. We’ve been told that we have to support Arab dictatorships in the name of security. But with courageous democratic uprisings happening all over the Arab world right now, I think the Western world now has a chance to understand Arabs better, and to understand why we need not fear them. Indeed the more I read about the Arab democratic movement, the more I find myself admiring Muslims instead of fearing them.
A lot of people I know are looking at the events in North Africa with a cynical ‘wait and see, it might become corrupted’ point of view. But I think we should be studying the movement very carefully. We can learn from it how not to be afraid.
On 18th January 2011, Asmaa Mahfouz, a 26 year old Egyptian woman, decided that she had enough of the corruption in her country’s government and the brutality of the police. Therefore she posted to the internet a video in which she described her intention to go to Tahrir Square, in downtown Cairo, and start protesting, and she invited others to do the same. A certain amount of fear attended her decision. Later on she told a journalist: “I felt that doing this video may be too big a step for me, but then I thought: For how much longer will I continue to be afraid and hesitant? I had to do something,” Ms. Mahfouz is a very visible example of leadership by action. A single person’s initiative and bravery became the most important link in a long chain of cause-and-effect which resulted in removal of Egyptian Presiden Hosni Mubarak from power, only twenty-four days later. It is important to note that in all the democratic uprisings in north Africa in the first two months of 2011, the Islamic fundamentalist terror group Al Qaeda played absolutely no role whatsoever. Nor did the protesters in those countries use violence to achieve their goals. They simply occupied major public squares in their cities and refused to leave until their demands were met. Mariam Soliman, another Egyptian activist, described herself as follows: “I am not socialist, I am not a liberal, I am not an Islamist. I am an Egyptian woman, a regular woman rejecting injustice and corruption in my country.”
There was violence at these protests. But it was overwhelmingly instigated by the corrupt politicians attempting to cling to power, again through the use of fear. Mubarak of Egypt, for instance, hired poor people from rural parts of Egypt to come to Cairo and beat up the protesters. And Muammar Gadaffi of Libya claimed that the protests were caused by Al-Qaida, and by drugs in young people’s coffee. In the first few days of the protest he deployed snipers on the rooftops of buildings, killing at least 15 people; he also destroyed the minaret of a mosque full of protesters using anti-aircraft missiles. The governments of these countries used fear to maintain their rule: fear of Islamic terrorists, primarily, as well as fear of their own police and military. But this kind of fear cannot be effective forever. As Mahfouz said, “Everyone used to say there is no hope, that no one will turn up on the street, that the people are passive. But the barrier of fear was broken.”
We, the people of Western world countries, continue to live in an environment of fear. We fear being attacked religious extremists, both foreign and domestic. We fear the loss of political rights, a loss of privacy, or a loss of freedom, taken by big governments (if you happen to be right-wing), or by big corporations (if you happen to be left-wing). We fear foreign immigrants with their strange customs, coming to our neighbourhoods to take our jobs, drain our welfare state, or commit crimes. We fear being injured, robbed or attacked, being judged by others, or neglected, or left unloved. We fear succumbing to an exotic pandemic disease. We fear the social breakdown that abortion, divorce, and same-sex marriage will supposedly cause. We have existential fears such as the fear of death, fear of freedom itself, fear of the afterlife, fear of being ‘unreal’ (a surprisingly common one, although difficult to describe), and fear of loneliness and isolation. We might boast of having none of these fears. Yet we immerse ourselves in escapist mass entertainment. We support fanatical politicians and preachers. Our politicians support dictators and tyrants in the name of “security” and “stability”. We arm ourselves to the teeth, and pray to God to be saved.
You might not feel constantly afraid of things all the time. But there is a part of you which knows what boundaries cannot be crossed. You believe, for instance, that bad things will happen to you if you speak out in favour of a just but unpopular cause. And so we supervise ourselves. Thus even when we say we have no fear of these things, fear still governs our minds.
But life does not have to be that way. We can liberate ourselves from the labyrinth. There are better ways to live. Someone has to take the initiative to break through the fear barrier. Someone has to take the initiative to love and trust her fellow living creature, and set us all free.
Will it be you?
________
Links related to this story:
Mona El-Naggar, “Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades” The New York Times, 1 February 2011.
Scott Shane, “As Regimes Fall in Arab World, Al Qaeda Sees History Fly By” The New York Times, 27 February 20111.
Volkhard Windfuhr, “Rural poor paid to attack opposition supporters” Der Spiegel, 4 February 2011
“Libyan snipers fire on mourners” CBC News, 19 February 2011
“Gadhafi blames al-Qaeda for Libyan riots” CBC News, 24 February 2011.
Friends, “the relationships book”, or “Number Six”, as I have been calling it for the last two or three years, now has a publishing contract!
Early this week I was offered a contract to publish “Circles of Meaning, Labyrinths of Fear” with OBooks, or by its new pagan imprint Moon Books. (Well, we might still change the title. But that’s the title I used in the proposal.)
For those curious to know what it’s about: well, if you are a regular listener of my podcast, then you already have a bit of an idea. Draft versions of some of the chapters were used in my segment of the show.
To give you more info: here’s the draft of the back cover copy:
You’ve heard of sacred places, writings, relics, and rituals, holy days and magical times of year. But these are actually representations of relationships that people have with each other and the elements of the world.
Some of these relationships environmental: they involve landscapes, animals, and the streets of your home town. Some are personal and individual, such as families, friends, and elders. Some are public, such as the relation between musicians, storytellers, medical doctors, and even soldiers. This book studies twenty-two of them, from a variety of traditions, and their place in ‘the good life’.
Yet these relations are always fragile and vulnerable. At every turn they are threatened by fears, from the fear of loneliness, to the fear of the loss of personal or political freedom, to the fear of death. To escape from these fears, people often trap themselves into ways of life that are bad for everyone, including themselves. This book studies how that happens, and how to prevent it.
More than beliefs, laws, and teachings, our relationships are the true basis of spirituality and freedom.
A release day has not yet been fixed, but it looks likely that it will be in early 2012. I’m delighted! More news to follow as the situation unfolds.
Thorn Coyle and I have a lovely chat about self knowledge, loneliness, and spirituality in Episode #38 of “Elemental Castings” podshow. I enjoyed recording it with her; I hope you enjoy listening in.
Here’s the link: http://www.thorncoyle.com/podcasts.html