Joan Borysenko, author of Pocketful of Miracles, writes of December: [It is]. . ‘the month in which all the forces of nature are aligned to help us give birth to the light within. Midwinter has cast a spell over the land and all of nature sleeps. Members of the human tribe gather by the fire to hear the old stories…
Meredith Monk opened the 2015 Artist and Buddhist Contemplatives gathering with a group vocalization of “AH.” This first sound of the gathering arose out of the silence and moved through all the participants together in a circle in the main hall at Garrison. And it proved a beautiful inspiration for Robert Thurman’s impromptu exposition on “A” during his talk that…
Omid Safi is a celebrated academic, Islamic scholar, On Being columnist, and author of several books including his latest, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition. With a strong focus on contemporary movements and linking mystical traditions of Islam with the work of Dr. King and Malcolm X, his new book renews and refreshes our sense of hope and…
At the end of January, one of my close spiritual friends died. A queer Black man, a Sufi imam “scholartivist” (scholar–artist–activist) and professor of ministry students, Baba Ibrahim Farajajé died of a massive heart attack. He was sixty-three, and I’m guessing he had been carrying too much. It was only six months earlier that Baba and I had sat together…
It seems that after any disaster or tragedy, be it a horror of human making, or the aftermath of nature’s wrath, be it across the oceans or around the corner, we are inundated with images of suffering across our TV screens and social media feeds. We witness faces contorted with fear, mouths gaping in disbelief, bodies crouched, crying uncontrollably. In…