War Prayers ~ Mark Twain and Lao Tse on the artlessness of war

The War Prayer ~ Mark Twain

Yesterday the people of The United States of America marked Memorial Day. It’s a day of baseball, hot dogs and apple pie, of families and communities gathering to celebrate the arrival of summer. It’s a day of flags and bunting and red, white & blue and national pride, and a […]

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The second book of The Way ~ Stephen Mitchell illuminates the Tao again.

The Second Book of the Tao ~ Stephen Mitchell

Mmmmm… a day of cloudy wet so a retreat into a tub of hot water with salsa & tortilla chips and a good book about one of my favourite subjects, Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao (Dao, Tao, same thing, same pronunciation: Dao). Hmmmm… the liner notes of […]

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We’re too good to be this political ~ Be the change you want to see in the world

The Second Book of the Tao ~ Stephen Mitchell

My first mistake today was climbing into the bathtub and picking up the May 31st, 2010 edition of Canada’s weekly news magazine, Macleans, rather than the copy of Stephen Mitchell’s The Second Book of the Tao, in which I’d thought to have a nice, long spiritual soak along with the […]

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The Dao de Jing ~ The transformational quality of seeing the beauty in all things.

Tao te Ching ~ Laozi ~ Stephen Mitchell

I can’t remember when I first encountered The Dao de Jing (also Tao te Ching, pronounced the same), which surprises me since it quickly grew to become my favourite written text. It’s brief (just 81 chapters of verse, a page or so each) yet richly nuanced. I’ve read all or […]

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The Tao of Love and Light: Riffing on physics and faith

The Tao of Physics ~ Fritjof Capra

The following is a comment storm that blew out of a seemingly innocent status message I posted on Facebook. It got a few of us thinking, and I think the thinking in it, on all sides, is interesting. Note that the quote, by Stephen Edwards, is not taken from the […]

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Winnie the Pooh and the Vinegar Tasters

The Vinegar Tasters

The Vinegar tasters is among my favourite allegories and provides an excellent introduction to the three philosophies that dominated China through thousands of years: Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. For me, the most important of these is Taoism, a gentle, soulful and luminous philosophy. I’m going to be lazy and let […]

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