My wife and I moved to Sonoma in April of 1990 after purchasing a six-room bed and breakfast inn on West Spain Street. It was later in that year, in November, when we first encountered what we used to call "the slow season." By December,... Continue

The color of Mars, the color of blood, the color of sunlight through a sky filled with smoke, red on the Cal Fire map means the land is burning. Buddhist paintings depicting wrathful deities often show the figures surrounded by red flames. Though deities like... Continue

For all the attempts to cast humanity in the brightest way possible -- religious positivism, new-age soul-making, liberal visions of the evolution of virtue, and fairy-tales with happy endings -- the dark side keeps casting a shadow across history. Is this simply, as some believe,... Continue

Documenting our lives through photographs went mainstream with the introduction of Kodak's "Brownie" camera, introduced in 1900 at the price of $1; the "snapshot" was born, and with it arrived a new sense of self. Prior to that, memories of travel to distant places were... Continue

I recently returned from a five-day convention of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, held in Tempe, Arizona. That's right, I'm a cactus and succulent nerd. For the past forty years I've been growing and collecting cactus and succulents, and some of the very... Continue

Things move so quickly in digital technology that yesterday's fad is old hat before it's even reached maturity. Such is the case with Virtual Reality (VR), the technology that promised us the god-like chance to step into worlds of our own making so exciting that... Continue

The mystic teacher G.I. Gurdjieff wrote of "three-brained beings" and their difficulties. Though his teachings were given during the early part of the 20th Century, the wisdom tradition in which he was steeped - Sufism and Middle Eastern mystic teachings - long taught the nature... Continue

The world has been in trouble before. Every century has had its share of discord, warfare, violence and mayhem, punctuated by periods of creative flowering, knowledge growth and cultural insight. That we find ourselves once again riven by conflict, feelings of instability and worries about... Continue

I once wondered how a modern, 20th century country like Germany morphed into an amoral, industrial-style genocide factory during Adolph Hitler's Third Reich. At the time, conditions in Europe were politically unstable; the aftermath of World War One left economies in shambles, and politics polarized... Continue