The first moments of the New Year are upon us, saturated with ritual, spiritual meaning, alcohol, and social pressure. These days I don’t much give a damn about New Year’s Eve, or so I tell myself. Back when I was single (32 years ago), I did give a damn. It was a night when I […] Read More

More than just a spin-the-bottle Christmas decoration, mistletoe is a plant with a wild past. What seems to give rise to its mythic reputation is the fact that it grows high in trees and stays green even when its host tree loses its leaves. With no visible means of support, it was believed to be […] Read More

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, late December is an intense time of year in this hemisphere and the concept of the virgin birth has probably affected your life. There’s plenty of argument about whether Jesus was born of a virgin mother. Fundamentalists of course say yes. Liberal Christians often say the virginity is symbolic. […] Read More

“…Sex…is often viewed as an obstacle on the path of spiritual development due to the wild nature of sexual energy.” My question: what’s wrong with wild? And what’s right with wild? The quote is from a post on Fractal Enlightenment. No, I don’t quite know what that means. But the writer has an excellent point. […] Read More

It’s enough to make one question authority, what the Boy Scout handbook of 1942 advised young fellows to do about their “urges.” If a boy were to be troubled by bad desires he should, the guidebook said, take cold showers, long walks, or — here’s the slightly unsettling surprise — “hip baths.” I ran across […] Read More

“Because of its endearing sexual code,” it was “the merriest” of America’s 19th century utopian communities, wrote critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin. The name Oneida is one you may recognize as a brand of forks and spoons — if you know the name at all. But the original Oneida metalsmiths were a commune that preceded […] Read More

This spiritual memoir, Red Hot & Holy by Sera Beak, is a hot mess in itself: wildly emotional, unsparingly personal, and written in a style that the author mentions as “spiritual street slang (‘gangsta goddess’).” It’s about the soul as the meeting place of human body and ethereal spirit, the part of us that connects […] Read More

Fresh experience of ancient mountains evokes awareness of God, the divine, the sublime, in some of the same ways the erotic can. (Or maybe I’m just longing to post some of my vacation pictures.) In my visit (got back last night) to Wyoming, I found in the mountains, geysers, glacier, fumaroles, bubbling “mud pots,” and […] Read More

A Hindu friend — who also admires philosophies of the controversial teacher of Tantra Osho, formerly known as Rajneesh — asked me recently exactly what I saw as the connection between sex and spiritual experience. Pleased to have a succinct answer (my sound byte) to that question, I said that I see both as a […] Read More

I feel almost obligated to be a Madonna fan. How many artists take on sex and religion and do so with such courage and success on an international scale? In fact, I am a fan of sorts. She is assuredly a terrific entertainer; she burns with passion and star power. She sure can sing. And […] Read More