"Stay calm. Share your bananas."
Koko the Gorilla

Scientific studies conclude that dolphins should be treated as "non-human persons." Crows possess "human-like intelligence" and have an elaborate and nuanced language; as do elephants, whose slow, infrasonic speech when speeded up sounds distinctly articulate...plus, they can hear other elephants six miles away!

"When we look at unity through the instruments of the mind, we see diversity; when the mind is transcended, we enter a higher mode of knowing...in which duality disappears. This does not mean, however, that the phenomenal world is an illusion or unreal. The illusion is the sense of separateness."
Eknath Easwaran

Surfaces create a great many of this world's problems, especially when that's all you're looking at. Since they're the most visible aspect, and the one we seem to interact with, they're easily mistaken for being the most compelling, the most important part of life – but that's not at all true.

There's a jackhammer in the distance, outside my window. My darkened smartphone makes watery drip tones each time an e-mail wants me to look at it. I hear big trucks pulling up in front of the corner supermarket to unload shrink-wrapped palettes of canned black beans. There's an ambulance siren on the horizon, wending its way to King's County Hospital. The Q train downstairs is running on time.

We often think of evolution writ large, as a sweeping movement across species and worlds – and so it is; but for me, my own evolution is personal, it's something I can only experience in the quality of my relation to Life, to others, and to my self. It's a spiritual evolution on every scale, writ as large as the entire planet, or as small as, well...as small as I Am.

"The Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate."
Joseph Campbell

"The fact that the mass of a particle is equivalent to a certain amount of energy means that the particle...has to be conceived as a dynamic pattern, a process involving the energy which manifests itself as the particle's mass."
Fritjof Capra

'Muhammed says, "God does not look at outward forms,
but at the love within your love."'
Rumi

With all the warnings about what "they're" doing to me; all the terror incessantly and vigorously being struck deep in my heart, and all the blame I might feel as a result of "not doing anything about it," here's a couple quick things I think I can do about it: