This is It

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Walt Whitman

...was talking to a friend while walking to dinner in Mexico about the Yoga Sutras...she didn’t like the part about abstinence...I don’t either...then, I don’t particularly care...

...not that I’ve got anything against Patanjali...whoever he was...just don’t see any reason why disagreeing with something somebody etched on parchment in India thousands of years ago should be a problem...any more than if it was written in Philadelphia yesterday...or vice-versa...

believe it if you need it; if you don’t just pass it on...
Robert Hunter

...for every love thy neighbor there’s an injunction to kill thy neighbor for one highly spiritual reason or other...for every ancient discipline of self-realization, there’s an even older caste system that labels some inherently holy, and others untouchable...for every life-saving medical procedure there’s a new weapon of mass murder...for every nice modern idea like democracy, there’s a nasty one like fascism....neither tradition nor innovation is inherently good or bad...valid or invalid...wise or stupid...

There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.
Annie Dillard