Essays by Larry Barnett
Women have been putting up with piggish men for a long time; do you recall the cartoon showing a helpless woman being dragged by the hair while a caveman says to his friend, “I love these pre-holiday sales!”? For a very long time, the meme of gender relations has been: man is the boss and woman… Read the rest
Speculation and conspiracy theories naturally flow from horrific massacres such as occurred in Las Vegas: Steven Paddock was trying to sell guns, was killed to make it look like a suicide; he was a hit man with a specific target among… Read the rest
Are we doomed to suffer? There seems to be widespread belief that suffering is the nature of human experience; (a) we are all born sinners afflicted with original sin; (b) we are bound within the circle of Samsara where our attachments breed suffering;… Read the rest
My wife and I moved to Sonoma in April of 1990 after purchasing a six-room bed and breakfast inn on West Spain Street. It was later in that year, in November, when we first encountered what we used to call “the slow season.” By December, reservations dramatically slowed down, and in January,… Read the rest
The color of Mars, the color of blood, the color of sunlight through a sky filled with smoke, red on the Cal Fire map means the land is burning. Buddhist paintings depicting wrathful deities often show the figures surrounded by red flames. Though deities like… Read the rest
For all the attempts to cast humanity in the brightest way possible — religious positivism, new-age soul-making, liberal visions of the evolution of virtue, and fairy-tales with happy endings — the dark side keeps casting a shadow across history. Is this simply, as some believe, the … Read the rest
Documenting our lives through photographs went mainstream with the introduction of Kodak’s “Brownie” camera, introduced in 1900 at the price of $1; the “snapshot” was born, and with it arrived a new sense of self.
Prior to that, memories of travel to distant places… Read the rest
I recently returned from a five-day convention of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America, held in Tempe, Arizona. That’s right, I’m a cactus and succulent nerd. For the past forty years I’ve been growing and collecting cactus and succulents, and some of the very first plants… Read the rest
Things move so quickly in digital technology that yesterday’s fad is old hat before it’s even reached maturity. Such is the case with Virtual Reality (VR), the technology that promised us the god-like chance to step into worlds of our own making so exciting that taking off our visors would… Read the rest
The mystic teacher G.I. Gurdjieff wrote of “three-brained beings” and their difficulties. Though his teachings were given during the early part of the 20th Century, the wisdom tradition in which he was steeped – Sufism and Middle Eastern mystic teachings –… Read the rest
The world has been in trouble before. Every century has had its share of discord, warfare, violence and mayhem, punctuated by periods of creative flowering, knowledge growth and cultural insight. That we find ourselves once again riven by conflict, feelings of instability and worries about the future… Read the rest
I once wondered how a modern, 20th century country like Germany morphed into an amoral, industrial-style genocide factory during Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. At the time, conditions in Europe were politically unstable; the aftermath of World War One left economies in shambles, and politics… Read the rest
Amoebas, as you likely know, are one-celled animals you can only see with a microscope. Tiny enough to swim freely in a drop of water, amoebas animate themselves using pseudopods, projections of its cell wall into lobes that move. They surround and absorb the living tissue of even tinier life forms, … Read the rest
He looked at his legs, still outstretched and beginning to glisten in the daylight. It had been a cool night, and his body would take a few minutes to warm up enough to get up and walk. Taking a deep breath, he smelled the dew evaporating from the ground and as shadows… Read the rest
As we witness the clown-like leadership circus happening in Washington D.C. it’s worthwhile to reflect on the leadership of our own locally elected officials and how well, or not, they are behaving and serving the public interest.
We have four major publicly elected boards or councils in our… Read the rest
Men’s war on women did not begin with Donald Trump, far from it. Its roots are Biblical and mythological, bound up with creation stories tying women to the introduction of sin and evil into the world; so deeply embedded in our collective psyches… Read the rest
Since its beginnings, Sonoma has been a small town. It once was the county seat, long ago, but that role fell to Santa Rosa and, well, thank goodness for that. From then on Sonoma’s destiny seemed to be an indelible Bear Flag moment of history combined… Read the rest
When an idea, an object, a substance or an emotion preoccupies consciousness to the near exclusion of anything else, we call it an obsession. And when an obsession becomes a compulsion so powerful as to assume the driving force of consciousness – even when harmful to oneself or others – … Read the rest
When President Dwight Eisenhower famously warned Americans about the Military-Industrial Complex he added a new metaphor into our cultural frame of reference, namely the emergence of collusion between government and industry systemically embedded within and affecting everyday lives. His prophetic… Read the rest
Our human experience is fundamentally emotional, and emotions are fundamentally confusing. The stuff of imagination and subconscious life, emotions are primordial, which means not subject to the whims of logic or reason. From the standpoint of brain development, logic and reason are newcomers… Read the rest