What To Do When Your House Is On Fire

Responding appropriately to climate change First—Be Aware Of What’s Happening And Take Action Immediately From a whole-systems perspective, the key to managing complex living systems is to manage the parts in right functional relationship to each other. When this happens, the whole takes care of itself. With regard to climate, Earth is the whole and individual […]

Photographing To Feed The Soul

Beyond taking pictures, make photographs that express emotion Being house bound, this is an excellent time to develop or exercise your creative “eye.” Modern cameras and smartphones in all price ranges have tremendous technological capability. But when I look around and on the internet, they’re mostly being used to produce images that  capture or document what’s […]

There’s More to Exchanging Gifts Than Meets The Eye

The art of making someone happy and celebrating the relationship This is our grandson, Ethan Miller. He was five-years-old. I choose this image because it represents the kind of joy we’d all like to see on someone’s face when they receive a gift from us. The subtitle indicates that there’s an art to gift-giving because […]

Acknowledgment

An expression of gratitude for an action or achievement Dr. Albert Sabin As part of a prime-time medical series for television called A Matter Of Life, producer David George and I filmed Dr. Sabin in his Washington, D.C. lab. An entire program was devoted to his development of the oral polio vaccine, which played a key […]

Autumn Reflection And Appreciation

As above, so below One of the benefits of a photographic image is that it presents us with a moment, usually a fraction of a second, and holds us there afterward so we can reflect and appreciate the subject matter—and possibly some significance it might have. The live scene or situation in front of the […]

Nature’s Wisdom

We can learn it the easy way or the hard way Ecoliteracy involves an understanding of the basic principles of ecology. Understanding is the relatively easy part. The challenging part is living accordingly. Due to the specificity and complexity of this topic, I draw heavily upon The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by […]

A “Divine” Sandwich

One of my favorite fast-food sandwiches is the Burger King Wopper. (Shown here as I ordered it). I hadn’t had one since before the pandemic, so when I drove through to get one recently I couldn’t help but express my gratitude, which turned into a contemplation where I traced each of its parts back to […]

Kenōsis: Recipe For Inner Abundance

In 2018, when His Holiness The Dalai Lama requested the Mind and Life Institute to organize a weeklong dialogue with top scientists and scholars to discuss the ecological situation and offer ways to move forward constructively, one of the participants was Sallie McFague, a Distinguished Theologian at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, […]

Spirit Lives On

Downtown on a playground A little girl saw a white man With a camera And she ran to him. Take my pitcher! Take my pitcher! Take my pitcher! She shouted. When photographing in other cultures The pointing of my camera Sometimes caused children to turn away And adults to turn their backs. What’s the difference […]

A “Divine” Sandwich

One of my favorite fast-food sandwiches is the Burger King Wopper. (Shown here as I ordered it). I hadn’t had one since before the pandemic, so when I drove through to get one recently I couldn’t help but express my gratitude, which turned into a contemplation where I traced each of the parts back to […]