Hi Spiritual Friends,
Here are fuller descriptions of the two weekly newsletters I’m be starting in January, hopefully to whet your interest enough to subscribe!
I believe in them both deeply, I hope you’ll see what I mean.
Enjoy! 🙏🌿
Doug
The “Spirituality for Citizens” Newsletter
As I read, listen and absorb today’s news coming from so many sources and in so many ways, one vitally important thing always strikes me as missing.
It’s missing whether the news flood is coming from the dwindling tribe of professional journalists or from podcasters, TV talkers, YouTubers, emailers, Twitterati, bloggers, or daily shouters of all varieties and angles.
What’s missing is the most important thing of all: A truly deep, wise, and practical understanding of the nature of reality, and of the human experience within that reality. It seems that no one, either those who broadcast or those who consume communication, are grounded in such an understanding of how reality works and therefore how, when things break, they can be fixed.
Armed with such understanding, how much better things would be!
And there is exactly such an understanding, absolutely free and more available than ever today, via the Internet from teachers around the world.
This understanding of reality and of man’s place in it, is centered around the one great problem of humankind, which is suffering and how to end it.
This body of vital knowledge is called the Dharma.
Grounded in many thousands of years of deep human research, mostly in the subcontinent of India, and then perfected by the historical figure of the Buddha, the Dharma is a miraculous master key to reality. In its essence it is entirely objective, reason-based, and non-religious, much like science.
The Dharma is thus very much a potential emergency medicine, a healing salve ready for use around the globe, in topical and internal applications. We and all suffering beings, including plants and animals and life-giving soil and water, and Mother Earth herself, urgently need this healing salve and soon.
If every human being was trained just a bit in Dharma, and thus realized that every communication is a potential act not only of harm and destruction but of healing and wholeness, how quickly humanity would heal!
As a former journalist at The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and other places for 30 years, I was a professional communicator of “the news.”
Then, over the past 20 years, I took a long break to study and practice meditation and Dhamma, and to run a meditation center for 16 of those years.
Today, I’m ready to put the Dharma and journalism together.
I’m starting with a weekly email newsletter, “Spirituality for Citizens.” Each week I’ll pick a different social, environmental, or human rights issues— sometimes Southeast Minnesota issues that are actually local examples of global problems—and examine it through a Dhamma lens. Each week I will try to clearly observe, accurately understand, and helpfully suggest steps to be taken at the level of root causes, with healing hopefully at the roots.
Please join me as a subscriber!
The Leaf Artist Newsletter
During the 20 years I spent studying and practicing Dharma, I kept busy at a second life task which was caring for my mother, Jean McGill.
Because over that same span of time, she developed a dementia that inexorably deepened, stripping away layer after layer of her memory and energy until her death in January, 2020.
But her dementia was remarkable and the living of it, both for her and her family, proved just the opposite of the existential terror we seem internally wired to endlessly imagine and fear, and arm ourselves against, and resist.
Instead my mother grew much happier over the years. She smiled more easily and frequently, even as her language and memory dwindled year after year to virtually nothing. She laughed and she opened more and more to receiving gentle massages, melting into them, as she had never done before in her life.
She was like a balloonist, dropping bag after bag of sand as she rose higher and higher into a still silent awareness, as one bright smiling light.
When people came into a room with Mom, encountering her stillness and smiling silence, and sometimes if they touched her gently and with love, her own gentle caressing touch in return, they themselves calmed and shone.
Moved by how Mom was transcending her calamity, and helping others in this quiet spiritual way, I started sharing anecdotes and photos with friends, and later at senior centers, retirement homes, nursing homes and churches.
I made an online presentation, The Leaf Artist, about Mom’s dementia journey, during that middle period when she still had some speech, which came out like Zen koans, with a healing honesty so poignant and alive.
Somehow Mom’s story, and mine too in how I never saw her as changed even one small particle from her utmost essence by her ravaging dementia, offered not only hope but also very practical and spiritual lessons to many.
Starting in January, I would like to share Mom with you, with one small story or anecdote in your email each week. In this way, I can let the radiance of Mom’s love flow to you, letting it grow and spread further every year, dispelling so much necessary fear and worry, and bearing with it not only her deep and unceasing love, but also the cool and healing wisdom of reality too.
Please join me as a subscriber!