I worked hard to graduate into Medicine, and harder to graduate out of it. I will always have my university degree, but I long ago ceased to be a doctor. I am a healer. I no longer diagnose or treat disease. I no longer want patients. Instead, I want those…

Early in his career, Jean-Jacques Rousseau won an Académie de Dijon prize for an essay he wrote about the contributions of art to the morals of society. In it he said that the arts of civilized societies serve only to “cast garlands of flowers over the chains men bore.” So…

Photography is the art of relationships. I take very many pictures, and I love to do so because I love the relating. The more I take of a subject, the deeper my relationship with it, the closer we become. For example, I’m looking at the trees around me as I…

This is the simplest and most direct statement that I can make about music. The composer must have in mind only the creation of a message of love of humanity and hope for its welfare. The performer, likewise, must cast aside all thoughts of his self- interest, and with love, with caring devotion, receive the message of love from the composer and as a communion give this to the audience. The audience must fervently desire to receive this love, and as fervently desire to return it to the performer and to the composer.

We read in The Little Flowers of St. Francis how St. Francis washed and healed a leper — “and even as the flesh began to heal, the soul began to heal also.” All healing, all treatment must be directed towards much more than the so called cure of the person’s…

Over all my years of endeavoring to heal, I have found time and again that I cannot work with The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds.* For music is the mother, and such a man has rejected her. He has no desire for the conciliation which is, I believe, the very essence of my work. Furthermore, as Mahler has said, “Music is the spirit language.” And my ultimate endeavor is to help the sufferer to become Aware of Spirit, Knowing his mother, himself and all as Its Manifestation.

Accepting all that others do to me as coming through them, as the Karmic Plan. All being, in this sense, acts of God. And all not for me but for the spirit within me. I accept all for the spirit within. (Well, not in fact — but at least in fantasy.) Note: to want others to treat you kindly is a desire. The Buddha’s Second Noble Truth is that our lives our anguish because of our desires. And this desire is major.

The suffix -phor means to carry. Hence metaphor, to carry beyond (meta meaning beyond). And from the root ESU, to be well, the Greeks derived euphoros, a feeling of great happiness, of well being. Hence our euphoria. It is metaphoria that gives rise to euphoria: it is the being carried over, transported, from the mundane to becoming Aware of the More, the Reality — the meta-reality, that leads to Wellness, to Enlightenment.

For the last thirty years of his life Sibelius, whom I so love, composed almost nothing. What was he hearing? What was he feeling? How was he living? It would seem that — so tragically — he survived only the physical cancer. I remember his death announcement in 1957, hearing…