WHEN I WAS YOUNG, freedom seemed the distance I could travel without having to slow down inside. But now, after many sojourns behind the curtain of noise, after many glimpses of what holds us up, after many elusive sightings of God in the unthinking faces of animals and stones, freedom has given way to liberty, which seems now the depths to which I can go within without having to move at all. And there, I have learned that great thinking and feeling bring us to the secret of being, the way great music brings us to the secret of silence.
Though the way is hard, we each make the world anew by seeing it, loving it, and expressing it. Recently, I spoke in the philosophy department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan on the subject: What is Liberal Arts? In essence, I shared that after all these years, after the many ways experience has worn the excuses from my tongue, I remain steadfast in my belief in the arts of liberation. For me, underneath all attempts at education is the question: How do we live together in our time on Earth? And what does it mean to be alive? And what are the deeper skills—the ways of seeing, being, holding, knowing, feeling, and perceiving—that help us through the miraculous and dangerous corridor it is to live a life on Earth?
This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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This story is from the July/August 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.
