This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Can we actually suppose that we are wasting, polluting, and making ugly this beautiful land for the sake of patriotism and the love of God? Perhaps some of us would like to think so, but in fact this destruction is taking place because we have allowed ourselves to believe, and to live, a mated pair of economic lies: that nothing has a value that is not assigned to it by the market; and that the economic life of our communities can safely be handed over to the great corporations.
Control | Dependence | Economics | Era | Failure | Freedom | Need | Nothing | People | Politics | Rationality | Society | System | Will | World | Worry | Society | Failure |
Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health - and create profitable diseases and dependences - by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This is health, wholeness, a source of delight.
Conservation | Discussion | Indispensable | People |
And I declare myself free from ignorant love. You easy lovers and forgivers of mankind, stand back! I will love you at a distance, and not because you deserve it. My love must be discriminate or fail to bear its weight.
The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared food, confronts inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality.
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heart why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith alone, faith without hope.
A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.
Ability | Change | Exploit | Mind | Mistrust | Will | Wrong | Understand |
The people didn't really want to be saints of self-deprivation and hatred of the world. They knew that the world would sooner or later deprive them of all it had given them, but still they liked it.
Beauty | Despair | Fear | Forethought | Grace | Life | Life | Peace | Rest | Sound | Time | Waiting | World | Beauty |
Monsanto doesn't care about feeding the world. We have to think about the wage slavery of migrant workers and salary slavery of those who are desperately unhappy.
Ability | Diversion | Energy | Heart | Marriage | Nothing | Rights | System | Television | Wife | Will | Work | Negotiation | Understand |
Small creatures die because larger creatures are hungry. How superior to this human confusion of greed and creed, blood and fire.
As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.
Too much of our history will seem to have taken place in the halls of capitols, where the accusers have mostly been guilty, and so have borne witness to nothing.
W. H. Auden, fully Wystan Hugh Auden
Defenseless under the night our world in stupor lies; yet, dotted everywhere, ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages: may I, composed like them of Eros and of dust, beleaguered by the same negation and despair, show an affirming flame.
Sound |
At the piano, scales, arpeggios and chords, the morning exercises, the afternoon's reading, the night's reflection, that's how to produce a virtuoso.
Sound |
A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new.