The Poetics of Natural Being: Buddhism, Creativity, and Nature

by Lama Elizabeth Monson

Words

Gardens and Psychedelia

Pat Pattison

I’ve just started my 45th year teaching at Berklee, and, with 50 years in front of classrooms (earlier teaching stints at Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame) someone might ask, “Isn’t that enough? When are you going to retire?” For me, retirement means stopping doing something you’d rather not do, in order to do something you’d rather do. Using that definition, I’ve been retired for nearly 50 years. It’s the thing I’d rather be doing, the thing I have a passion for. As an undergraduate philosophy major at the University of Minnesota, I took a Humanities course in the great novels. Reading Voltaire’s Candide, I found a principle that’s informed much of my work and certainly my attitudes towards both my professional and personal life. After an entire novel of trouble and misadventures, Candide and the philosopher Pangloss …

A New Lens on Old Film: A Twenty-Something’s Angle on Art House Cinema

Isabella Komodromos

“Killing Time,” and Other Poems

Cristopher Gonzalez

New Voices, Traditional Forms: Student Sonnets & Sapphic Stanzas

Five Poems

Lindsey O’Neill

4 New Poems

Charles Simic, Former U.S. Poet Laureate

What’s in a Landscape?

Wayne Wild

Music

Music in Islamic Philosophy

Peter Adamson

Despite his importance as the first Muslim intellectual to make use of ideas from the Greek philosophical tradition, we don’t know much about the life of al-Kindi. We do know roughly when he lived (the ninth century CE), that he was descended from a companion of the Prophet, and that his father was governor of Kufa. Beyond that we have only a few anecdotes about him. But one of them, preserved for us by the the historian al-Qifti, is well worth recounting. It seems there was a rich merchant who had taken up against al-Kindi and went about slandering his name. Then the merchant’s son fell ill, paralyzed and unable to speak. It was both a personal and financial blow, because the son was in charge of keeping track of the books for the merchant’s business and vital information was …

Musical Setting of Sara Pirkle Hughes’s “What Hurts”

Neil Olmstead

The String Revolution: Beux’s Etude pour violin solo & The Responsibility of the Composer/Performer

Sean Brennan

Against The Odds: an Exploration of Bulgarian Rhythms

Vessela Stoyanova

Art

Pastoral Mosaics: Journeys Through Landscapes Rural

Brian Michael Barbeito

This work is from an ongoing photo essay. I am currently documenting nature walking in Southern Ontario, Canada. Among the environments explored are woodlands, farms, open fields, but also the deeper forests, off path, where people such as dog walkers, nature enthusiasts, landscape photographers, and even weekend and serious hikers don’t venture. There are hidden streams, strange trees, untouched wildflowers, and more, which provide continual inspiration for writing and, of course, photography.