What Would Thoreau Say?

When I was a kid everything, and I mean everything, was closed on Sunday.  Now without getting into the question of why we don't do that anymore ($$$$$),  I want to explore the idea of setting aside a day, or at least part of the day for absolutely nothing. Wait... not nothing, actually setting aside a day for what matters. Sabbath days have been with us since the beginning.  In the Bible, of course, God rested on the seventh day (a questionable enterprise considering all he had created;  who's gonna manage that stuff?  No time for a day off God;  but I digress...).  But well before that God, history records that ancient societies have been resting purposefully often to honor their deity since people formed community. In certain cultures, Jewish for instance, Sabbath is taken seriously, as in no-excuses seriously.  I've written before on this blog how Chain Potok, he of The Chosen, Gift of Asher Lev and countless other classics, is my f...

Yes, I'm back... Pete Seeger died last night.  At 94 he spent a good part of his life wreaking havoc on the establishment and calling us all to a peaceful way of living. His passing hit me hard, I must admit.  I spent my first anti-Vietnam War protest with 'ol Pete' as he called himself.  We picketed the Ossining NY Post Office... that's right, the Post Office.  The logic was it was the only federal building within reach and as good as any in calling attention to the injustice of that war. It was also right on Highland Ave. across from the high school so all the traffic in and out of town had to pass us marching, carrying signs, chanting very pithy things like 'one, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war,' a chant I remember ol pete not too happy with... we didn't do it long.  This was suburban America, after all and that's our parents and their friends driving by.  We were being radical... but not that radical. Later in life I had ...

When you wash the dishes...wash the dishes simple Buddhist description of mindfulness What the Buddhist teachers are trying to get across here is that when we do something we should really be doing just that something.  We should be concentrating on the issue at hand. I don't know about you but I never do that.  When I'm washing the dishes (a task I try to avoid) I'm thinking about the kids and Jennifer's new baby, Kristin's new job, Kurt's poetry and writing that he's waiting to hear from a publisher about.  I'm not thinking about the cheese I'm washing off the plate, I'm wondering why I keep coughing, and how I'm going to raise the money I need to keep the monastery open. My mind is on money and figuring out if I have enough to make it this month. The dishes wash themselves, really. Truth is we all do this a lot.  We are always thinking about something else right? The past for me is bitter sweet, and I think about it a lo...

As we proceed through the program Simplicity, Silence, Sabbath, let us look at the first of the five attitudes we must have to simplify our lives:  intention. Intention Some things you remember-I was seven or eight years old when I set the course of my life in motion.  I was to become a major league baseball player. You say, 'how do you remember you were seven or eight?'  I was in the back of my father's station wagon, with two friends, probably A.T. Higle and Rusty Hoehn, and we were coming back from a game at Yankee Stadium where the hated Yankees (Giants fans were the Aschermanns) played the Boston Red Sox.   I had my new 'SOX' hat on and was absolutely convinced from that day forward, nothing would stop me from one day wearing a real SOX hat and playing in that stadium.  (Little did I know at the time I had bought a White Sox hat when I thought I was buying a Red Sox hat; a telling sign I would say-see below). How you might also say could...

So, let us begin the exploration of these three words and their meaning to us today, here, in this world, at this time. I will tell you that in my 35+ year spiritual search I have determined that these three words comprise a summary of each of the spiritual disciplines I have studied and especially the one I practice, Christianity.  Each of the spiritual masters, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Moses, Mohammed and Jesus called us to a realistic way of life centered on living with as little complication as we can, going off to find times for silence and prayer, and sanctifying time, as in 'this is the only time I have and I should cherish it.'  Each of these masters, in their own words, have said "do not store up treasures here on earth where moth and rust consume and thieves break in and steal; rather store up treasures in heaven and you will be rewarded."  In other words, all the BMW's in the world ain't gonna make you happy (more on my BMW binge later in this blog).  ...

My last post about the Republican candidates and Jesus caused enough stir that I decided to take a break.  Now I come back with something a little more postive and perhaps even...god forbid...enlightening and helpful. Recently I have done a series of talks predominantly at churches here in the DC area called Simplicity, Silence and Sabbath.  These talks have generated some interest and it occurred to me that it might be fun to take the content of these talks and turn them into entries on the blog and eventually perhaps turn them into another book, or ebook which I understand is becoming all the rage. So for the next god knows how many weeks and months, I'm going to begin posting my SiSiSa (as I call it) content for the millions of readers of this blog. My expectation is that after reading these entries and actually answering the questions, we will change the world. SiSiSa is a very personal program that provides opportunity for people to take a look at these three e...

Recently I read that GAP had a tough quarter (I think it's more like a tough decade) because sales are down, same store sales are flat, underwear sales are crusty...can't remember which sales report I read.  It said that they had to open about a gazillion new stores during the holidays to keep up and make sure their shareholders are happy and not revolting.  (Revolting shareholders is for another post...) But I thought as I was reading this when did our economy get so dependent on greed?  Was it always that way?  When I was a kid and we went downtown to shop in Ossining, and the shops were open late one night a week and absolutely closed Sunday, did the merchants suffer?  Did they make it because they were greedy or because they were small business people who did this for a living to feed their families and put a roof over their head? When did we have to start promoting Black Friday starting on the 4th of July?  And when did we begin watching companies ...