By Steve Lewis The soundtrack to my road trip fantasy always begins with the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man.” In my imagination, the camera pans down to a glistening Winnebago cresting a hill on a clear blue July morning, everyone in my big family laughing, free as the clichéd wind as we sluice down narrow lanes and merge onto interstates crisscrossing…
I recently attended Zen Brain: Consciousness, Complex Systems, and Transformation, an intensive three-day retreat with a panel of brilliant experts that included scientists, philosophers, and Buddhist thinkers. The conference was held at Upaya Zen Center, nestled in a quiet valley surrounded by mountains in the heart of Santa Fe. Upaya, founded on a vision of Buddhism, is based on the…
Do you know how some people walk into a room and bring it to life? That’s Agapi Stassinopoulos. Her first name means “unconditional love” in Greek, and that’s what she so brilliantly shares. I met Agapi last summer. She’s an inspirational speaker, teacher, actress, and author. Last week, in a talk she gave at the META Center in New York City,…
On January 15, 1929, in the bedroom his parents shared in his grandparents’ house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Michael Luther King Jr. was born. No, Michael is not a typo. It wasn’t until 1934, upon his return from a globe-spanning journey that had taken him from Paris and Rome to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where he was a delegate…
Nelson Mandela enjoyed such a long twilight that it’s easy to forget what a threatening figure he once cut—not just in South Africa but in the United States, where he was routinely condemned as a Communist terrorist. In 1985 William F. Buckley wrote: “where Mandela belongs…is precisely where he is: in jail.” Mandela made no bones about being a revolutionary;…
I’m no etymologist, but thanks to the magic of the Internet I can pretend to be one. I have learned that in many languages—Old French, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian, and even Sanskrit—the root of the word grace is linked to the word for thanks, or gratitude. And so to keep from getting lost in the business of Thanksgiving—the overcrowded supermarket…
