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    Big, Big Bang Paid Member

    By Richard Panek
    One of the fathers of the Big Bang was sitting across the aisle from me on the train, so I introduced myself. I had seen P.J.E. Peebles speak at a conference in Washington that afternoon at the National Museum of Natural History, and now we made small talk about this and that: the weather, a mutual acquaintance, the end of the universe. Then we shook hands and went our separate ways. But for the rest of the ride between Washington and Princeton, where he got off, I couldn't help glancing across the aisle every so often and marveling at how recent our present conception of the cosmos is, that at any moment one of its founders might be sitting among us on a train, chatting with his wife and sipping a Budweiser. More »
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    The Millennium: A Bridge between the Relative and the Ultimate Paid Member

    By Fred Cooper
    One way of viewing the millennium is that the infinite would again take finite incarnation to benefit beings at a certain point in space and time. Although such an occurrence is always welcome, we should be aware that the infinite is always present and place our emphasis on recognizing that. Otherwise, we are always stuck in finite, relative reality, where the concepts of space and time constrain and solidify our experience. It is exactly beyond the relative reality in which the concepts of space and time exist that we contact the infinite, space and time being constructs co-emergent with our finite, incarnate mind-body system. More »
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    Fuse Yajiro's Death Poems Paid Member

    A warrior named Fuse Yajiro grew ill in the spring, and by autumn he was dying. He wrote this poem: Before longI shall be a ghostbut just nowhow they bite my flesh!the winds of autumn. After Writing this poem so full of nostalgia for life, Fuse Yajiro recovered somewhat and lived on for another month. Something must have changed his mind about death, for in a mood of greater detachment, he wrote another death poem: Seen fromoutside creationearth and skyaren't wortha box of matches. —from Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death (Tuttle, 1998). Image: Triangle, Circle, Square, Walter De Maria, stainless steel, 1972. Photo courtesy of The Menil Collection. More »
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    In the Time of Waste Paid Member

    By Joanna Macy
    Joanna Macy, author, activist, and Buddhist teacher, looks at time from the perspective of our nuclear legacy. She co-founded the Nuclear Guardianship Project aimed at "monitored retrievable storage" of our radioactive wastes. For the ongoing protection of life, Guardian Sites could become centers of reflection where the containments of radioactivity are monitored and repaired and practices from wisdom traditions are applied. More »
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    Time from the Point of View of a Slime Mold Paid Member

    By John Bonner
    As we get older we wonder at our impatience, when, as children, we had to wait in the station for the train to arrive. It is one of the many signs that time has very different meanings for us, even over our own life span. Time and life are intertwined in so many different ways, something biologists are acutely aware of. Consider a few extremes: A single-cell bacterium may live its entire life cycle in half an hour, but a generation for an elephant takes twelve years, and a giant sequoia generation takes sixty years. One reason I work with slime molds in the laboratory is that their generations are short, so that if I start an experiment on Monday, I will know the result by Wednesday or Thursday. This kind of biological time—life-cycle time—is at the middle of the time scale of living phenomena. More »
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    Watching the Ancestral Prayers of Venerable Others Paid Member

    By Pattiann Rogers
    Lena Higgins, 92, breastless, blind, chewing her gums by the window, is old, but the Great Comet of 1843   is much older than that. Dry land tortoises with their elephantine feet are often very old, but giant   sequoias of the western Sierras are generations older than that. The first prayer rattle, made   on the savannah of seeds and bones strung together, is old, but the first winged cockroach to appear on earth   is hundreds of millions of years older than that. A flowering plant fossil or a mollusk fossil in limy   shale is old. Stony meteorites buried beneath polar ice are older than that, and death itself is very, very   ancient, but life is certainly older than death. Shadows and silhouettes created by primordial sea storms   More »