Before she died in 2014, Maya Angelou had for decades enjoyed oil wells pumping in her living room, gold mines spewing riches in her backyard, and for a nice sexy touch, she appeared to keep diamonds at the meeting of her thighs. (No word on whether they came from a diamond mine in her bedroom…)

We know this because she described these mighty assets in her 1978 volume from Random House, “And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems,” one selection simply dropping the “And” to make “Still I Rise” the near-title poem in the collection. (The poem is printed in full below.)

Angelou was a seeming force of nature over the course of her 50+ year career as a memoirist, essayist, poet and civil rights activist. Morally serious, unafraid, measured and eloquent, her voice resounded both on the page and into microphones, making her compulsively listenable.

She was a kind of James Earl Jones of the literary set, giving nothing aw...

Nine revolutions around the sun for “Traversing” this week, which lands us on the doorstep of our Ninth Annual Holiday Photo Gallery. Today, we will wander as we please, linger where we want, and emerge all the better in the spiritual and aesthetic nourishment that is so fundamental to our very survival as self-reflective creatures with an eye always scanning ahead toward more joyful horizons.

May these shots from stellar photographers around the world be worth more than any 1,000 words I could pull together as we inch ahead, ready or not—because time just does not care—toward 2022.

With the good news being: still here!

***

Poof! Good-bye, 2021…by Doug Wheller

***

She’s a lady—and an imposing one, at least from this angle…by dr.larsbergmann

***

Apparently not his first rodeo…by Klim Musalimov

***

Just another crazed cumulus…by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

***

Into the mystic in Mya...

At this time of year when much of the world is observing events steeped in ancient lore and enchantments, what can we say about the settings and places where we perceive something as sacred? What do we even mean by “sacred space?” What qualities must any space reflect to be deemed “sacred?” Who decides what those qualities are?

Years ago, “U.S. News & World Report” ran a lengthy cover story headlined, “Sacred Places.” Its rather exhaustive list of such places contained all the usual suspects, though it was dominated by buildings and monuments.

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

The Golden Temple in India.

Stonehenge, Karnak in Egypt, the temple of Confucius, the entire city of Mecca.

Interestingly, there was little said about awe-inspiring natural settings—the Grand Canyon, Mt...

We’re into our annual holiday music mode, our surroundings suffused with traditional Christmas carols and pop songs saluting the season. Little drummer boys going pa rum pum pum pum, sleigh bells jingle-ing, ring-ting tingle-ing, oh, but we have a merry time gliding through the malls and filling our baskets with impossibly packaged toys that resist penetration with all the impregnable fortitude of Fort Knox, do we not?

But amidst all the commercial ballyhoo, there lies a more contemplative dimension: that of a sacred inwardness, a bow to darkened days, the denuded trees and grayed skies of winter, with its incipient if distant promise of renewal.

In much of the world, the symbol of this promise revolves around a child born in a manger to a poor couple, a special star appearing in the sky to note this birth was destined to transform the world...

When I served as president of the board at my Unitarian Universalist (UU) church years ago, I commenced one board meeting with the check-in question, “Spiritual or religious? Church or congregation? Worship or service?”

These were actually one question, the dual poles of which are reflective, I think, of a (mostly) healthy and perhaps eternal tension among and between people who profess to practice a religion and others who have fled organized, overtly theistic religion but who retain an avowed “spiritual” orientation to serve as a North Star in their lives.

.In the case of UUs, I had to include the “church or congregation?” snippet because some members resisted calling what we did there every Sunday and most all the days in between “church,” despite the entire setting and context and rituals being pretty much indistinguishable from what that word has always meant to people across the religious firmame...