Boston Marathon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While a marathon may be an experience of individual triumph, our experience of last year’s terror remains collective. From near misses to eyewitnesses, our lesson should be how well connected we are. We count among our friends the fallen and heroes, and those left puzzling how their schoolmate “Zack” could have gone so wrong. Despite subsequent efforts of some to appropriate “Boston Strong” as a mere brand, it is both through our celebration of individual striving and shared determination that we remain strong this year.

Read my previous posts on the Boston Marathon bombings.

This is kitchari. Indian comfort food. A traditional Ayurvedic cleansing dish used for detoxifying and healing.

Grounding, calming, warming, balancing.

Kitchari can be made in infinite ways, but in its basic form is a stew/porridge-like mixture of split mung beans and grain warmed with spices and enhanced by vegetables. Perfect for giving your digestion a break while still providing the body with a nourishing and filling meal. And even more perfect now that it’s fall and the cold is starting to seep into my bones, when I desire nothing more than curling up on the couch with a steaming bowl of comfort.

In this specific recipe I use both whole and split mung beans for extra protein and fiber, but adding a grain like brown rice/quinoa/barley etc. to the mix is the traditional way and tastes just as well. Use whatever veggies you’re into or whatever can be found in…

Boston Marathon (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We don’t know, and we can’t imagine.

via “We Don’t Know.” (a post on Quest for Meaning, a Unitarian Universalist blog.)

Today as I go about my life, I hear the words of Martin Sheen in my head, narrating a documentary I sometimes show in my classes, “On this day, there is only one place to be.” The words are a part of “Bringing Down a Dictator,” a film about the nonviolent overthrow of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2000.

For me, on this day, there was only one thing to do. Our scheduled topic for my Introductory Sociology class was religion. I did work in the topic, but clearly not in the way I had planned. We talked about the Boston marathon bombings, and differently in each class, deferring to the experiences of people in the room. Some of…

This has got to be the best April Fool’s prank I have ever seen. Watch it and see if you can keep a dry eye. I dare you.

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together (New York: Basic Books, 2010)

Last night I attended a lecture by Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She was talking about her new book, Alone Togther: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2010). I also heard her speak of this on Being with Krista Tippett in a show called “Alive Enough? Reflecting on Our Technology.”

Expect here soon a longer reflection on that lecture, and how yoga may provide a different stance. For now, consider that some of how she started was already anticipated in a song by Greg Brown, “‘Cept You and Me, Babe” on his album Covenant (2006, Red…

We’re caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly…I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.

– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I first used this quote when I wrote a version of my first post on Sandy Hook Elementary, back when Jared Loughner shot Gabby Giffords. I think that the ongoing resolution of this fundamental tension—being what I ought and allowing you to be what you ought—is the basic dynamic of a peacefully contentious politics.

The source of this quote is King’s speech “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” which he delivered as Oberlin College, but also at the National Cathedral in Washington on March 31, 1968…

I have written before about how the singer songwriter Bob Franke said that his songs sometimes came to him in dreams. This morning in that moment between sleep and wakefulness, I was blessed with a visual and a first line, and it’s high time. I had a run of poems a while back, haiku in particular. It’s always only a moment, so I am glad to see the inspiration return, if only for just this moment.

Sand grains cross the moon
Birds in formation far off
We stay to observe

It is an image at some level given to me by Geoff Bartley’s “Sanderlings.” Speaking of the migration of these tiny beachcombers migrating a mile high, he intones “Someone with a night telescope might see them as fine grit streaming across the face of the moon.” Still, I hope you enjoy.