The most important question we can ask ourselves All philosophy and religion, all value systems, every guide to living comes down to this: What is worth doing? The answer to this question is what gets us out of bed in the morning. If we conclude while lying there that nothing…

Love, being human, and our relationship to the natural world — On a calm, overcast day thirty years ago, I emerged from the Alaskan wilderness happy to be alive yet apprehensive about going back to the developed places. I had only been in the bush a litte over two weeks. What of any real significance can happen to a person during…

Why can’t humankind get its act together? — The human condition is hopeless, or so it seems. A long, hard look at how the world functions these days and all prospects of humanity living in peace and prosperity suddenly evaporate. The daily news is full of conflict, corruption, and chaos. One group of people is always benefitting at…

Taking an entirely different approach to what is real — We are flawed in our perception of reality — all of us, all the time. Secular thinkers and true believers alike, we muddle through life, pretending that we have a good bead on things. But we do not. The few truly humble people among us know this and accept it…

The indisputable reality of flickering flames. — Even though I hold a degree in philosophy and have read hundreds of religious and philosophical tracts since my college days, what little insight I have into the nature of things has come to me during excursions alone in the wild, usually while sitting before a campfire. Here are a…

Modern cosmology has created an inescapable conflict. — The truth of the world is written in the stars. Shamans believed as much in the centuries before the birth of civilizations, and later high priests acted upon this belief. They built temples in alignment with the sky, calibrating the positions of the sun, moon and stars, thus divining the…

Seeing the sacred in the natural world — The juvenile hummingbird sucking nectar from the flowers in my back yard is loading up for its first flight south. It will fly alone, thousands of miles, across the Gulf of Mexico, to a winter home it has never seen. That’s quite the undertaking for a three-inch creature that weighs…