Eden by Steve Garnaas-Holmes by Steve Garnaas-Holmes Out beyond Eden it was also garden. Still is. And we are still here. The tangled roots of the Tree of Life hold us, have never let us go. Fruit trees gladly share with us, the grasses embrace us, the ocean bows at our feet, forests lift their arms in prayer. Currents of air and ocean swirl like Vincent's starry skies— too much paint! too much energy! too much color! wild, unleashed!— all speaking the language of beauty and overabundance. Every creature has its part, receives its blessing, offers its gift. The toad is not ridiculed for its looks. The slug is not accused of being lazy. The worm is not thought of as lowly. The crab with its little tweezer hands, the woodpecker whacking away, the desert scrub, the barnacles waving their silly little fronds, all find their food. Every great predator contributes. The lions are subject to the fleas. Vines grow in Chernobyl, blossoms, every year, at Auschwitz. There are dragonflies. Th...

  So, with Joy (Harjo) as our teacher, I think we’re called to practice living in the whole of time; to practice knowing in our bodies and our minds time as a more generative canvas and companion on which we carry and confront and inhabit and work with the hardness and the sacredness of what we have before us; to reconcile on this kind of canvas who we want to be with the histories we’ve lived and told and the future we desire.   On Being Podcast I have always been fascinated by “time” and “imagination”. The former term gives me hope when I am able to expand my sense of it into a dimension of eternity which minimizes past, present and future pain and offers that “arc of justice” or in my configuration “arc of mercy” which not only consoles but transfigures current anxiety into deep compassionate hope. To take that journey requires the second term: imagination. (not to mention faith!) When I was in 8th grade my history teacher returned a paper to me with a grade of A+ and proce...

  As I ponder words like freedom and emancipation and liberty and justice, I fend off other words like tyranny and slavery and cruelty. It is so hard. I pray we find the hope and the truth and the way to a radical liberty for every single human being: Fourth of July by Steven Garnaas-Holmes Oh, Nation, I salute you and I chasten you, land that I love and lament: your liberty and justice for some and not others, your innovation and energy and slavery and genocide, your high ideals and your war-making, your peace and your violence, born of an idea you can't quite believe and a shot heard round the world that's still shooting and shooting, your spacious polluted skies, your amber waves of chemically treated grain, your melting pot diversity and fear of diversity, your pride, your arrogance. God shed his grace on thee, for we are going to need it, hard times coming, if we are to see liberty and justice for the rest of us. Let the fireworks begin.