I spent a week doing Tai Chi at the Rigdzin Ling retreat center of the Chagdud Gompa Tibetan Buddhist association in the Trinity Alps in Northern California. On the sunny days, when we did some of our practice outdoors, we … Continue reading
Category Archives: Faith and Religion
This summer has been good for fungi in northern Illinois because it was wet, then dry, then wet, then dry, and mostly cool. On our walks through woods in the Chicago metropolitan area my husband and I have seen a lot of fun fungi. Here are some samples, sortakinda identified.
Continue readingCrows will hang around and harrass anything up to and including a bulldozer, if they think they know something to itseak-fungus-on-log dispraise that they can repeat at the top of their lungs. Think fourth-graders on a playground. These guys hadn’t a hope of budging the eagle, but you can see this one is determined to keep an eye on it.
Continue readingToward the end of my last year in high school, my speech teacher gave us copies of a textbook the district was considering adopting. I only remember one thing about it: in the front was an errata page that said … Continue reading
So I was reading for review a recent publication of Christian Fantasy and Science Fiction. I realize that a great many (if not most) of the people I know in the sf/f world roll their eyes out of their heads … Continue reading
I want to state at the outset that this article is not about political points of view. It’s about the way we communicate or fail to communicate ideas. I have been without political affiliation my entire adult life, but am … Continue reading
I found this enchanting. The creature weighed only a few ounces, but it was challenging monsters thousands of times bigger and heavier. There was something magical, even holy, in its valor and determination.
Continue readingI am now coming to grips with the finiteness of Sir Terry’s work. He was angry the way Carl Hiaasen is angry, joyfully and tirelessly imaginative in his skewering of the people and causes and world-views I think are awful. We found the same things beautiful. Even his darkness was shot through with light, as if life was too strong in him to be poisoned by the urge to destroy the world that visits many authors of his years. He poured out love on the sort of people I love. We agreed on what was important. We were intimate in the very best way that an author and his reader can be intimate: he didn’t know me from Eve, and I had all but memorized his work.
Continue readingIt’s WWW Wednesday. This meme is from shouldbereading. • What did you recently finish reading? Some months ago a member of BVC recommend Ghost Planet by Sharon Lynn Fisher. Literature has a long history of dealing with how we treat “the … Continue reading
This week, I’m passing along an article from the Bahá’í World News Service about the efforts of PEN International to defend persecuted writers the world over. I include a link to the original posting of the story interested readers can … Continue reading