Hi friends - happy to let you know that David Wilcox and I are leading two retreats in January - and you're invited. January 13th-15th in Hot Springs, NC. (joined by the illustrious Karen Moore), and January 28th/29th in Santa Monica, CA.

This past weekend I was at a brilliant wedding of beautiful friends, which on this occasion meant staying in a hotel. It seems like many hotel lobbies these days are like airport departure lounges - I counted five television screens, each playing a different "newsish" channel, the noise of the anchors competing with the Muzak coming from the reception desk. A fake gas shortage had been created by local panic buying, so the red strip across the bottom of one of the newsish channel screens read something like FEARFUL DRIVERS RUSH TO BUY GAS.

I had a wonderful time at Greenbelt, which after 44 years is on its third or fourth or umpteenth renewal - an amazing space for creativity, friendship, activism, and most of all, permission to be creative, friendly, and activist. We did a little contemplative talk show with guests Bill McKibben, Broderick Greer, and Nadia Bolz-Weber, and some good folk in the community asked for information on music and other things that were heard in the space.

So, here's what I remember:

The music was...

You deserve to be known by the miracle of a day.
You are cradled through the night, the dusk affirming yesterday’s work.
You don’t just wake. You awaken unto something.

The miracle of a day.

What can happen in a day?
Everything.

Oliver Assayas creates feelings in his films that leave me likely to wonder if I'm actually in them, experiencing the narrative. He does this, for me, better than any director working today. CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA is as enigmatic as the title, most of it taking place in a part of Switzerland that seems to be the outcome of a dream Thomas Mann had after reading Tolkien.