We’re in full nectar flow here in the Nonotuck biome—& even a zombie can feel the anima: the “soul, spirit, life, air, breeze, breath.” This painting is part of Philip Taaffe’s Anima Mundi series on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, March 23 – June 12, 2011. If you can, stand beneath [...]
The long body is the sum of all life on earth from the beginning to now; and if we love and believe in life, it extends into the future too. As you can see from the link (green words), the concept of the long body is attributed to the Iroquois. I don’t dispute, and in [...]
Meeting Nature’s God: The Jeffersonian Sublime When: Weds. May 4, 7-8:30 PM Where: Watson Room, Forbes Public Library, Northampton, MA Thomas Jefferson’s natural philosophy is distilled in a phrase he wrote to his nephew: “freedom is the gift of nature.” His natural philosophy informed both his political theory and his theology. At the center of [...]
This painting is part of Philip Taaffe’s Anima Mundi series on display at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, March 23 – June 12, 2011. _____ A few days ago I celebrated Earth Day with two bright & excitable 2nd grade classes. My goal was to get them to wonder. I wanted to seed [...]
Here are the readings for our discussion in the Watson Room @ Northampton’s Forbes Library on Weds. night from 7—8:30 PM, Jefferson’s Roots: Stoicism, Deism and “the laws of nature and of nature’s god”; I believe it will take two or three hours to complete them. Click all links! To understand what Jefferson meant by [...]
Over there on facebook, a friend wrote: “I’m curious to hear your take on Jefferson’s ideas in practice toward the Indians and their land.” The simplest response is that Jefferson tried to prevent the Euro-American genocide of Native Americans by getting them to become farmers; however, this did not work. A deeper response exposes how [...]
Jefferson wrote that to John Adams, in the same letter that contains this: To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul.
Visiting Grandma in Naples, FL for a few days: you’d laugh if I told you I miss the snows of Nonotuck. (But I do!) As we waited to land, the airliner hung over the sprawl that, from above, looks like a computer chip: close enough that we could see the golf carts meandering the courses, [...]
In parts 1 & 2 of this meditation, I’ve shown how our over-the-top consumerism makes us hog the world’s natural resources and invade nations so we can continue the hogging, and how our hoggishness corrupts our political, economic and legal culture. Now let’s consider Thomas Jefferson’s definitions of citizenship and freedom. Volumes have been written [...]
