Press & Blog

A six-shot revolver has six chambers. The album this song opens is called Dopamine Chamber. A spiritual reading of Fontaines D.C.’s “Six Shot Morning”: can you call the world beautiful when you can’t feel it, what happens when sadness becomes content for the screen, and why “always” sounds less like a promise than a sentence. Plus the Buddhist idea that clinging to permanence is where suffering starts, and what sitting offers in place of an audience.

Most days don’t announce themselves. A song that insists each one is “just another day on earth” ought to feel like a dismissal. To me it feels closer to a blessing. A spiritual reading of Brian Eno’s “Just Another Day,” newly back in print: is the word “just” resignation or release, why repetition works like a mantra, what it means to imagine putting it all behind us, and how impermanence cuts both ways, taking the hard days and the good ones.

When U2 released "The Greatest Show on Earth," one word stopped me: once. This is a spiritual reading of the song's questions about love, faith, and impermanence. Falling in love is the easy part. Staying is the practice. What does it mean to keep faith in someone you can never fully know, to ask whether a vow is a church of love or fear, and to love without clutching something that was always going to change? Along the way: Zen, hurt, and what's left when the lights go out.

Interpol’s new title track asks what we do with a mirror that weighs a ton. This essay reads it as a spiritual question: is silence the end of feeling or the far side of it? Drawing on my own experience of sitting with a loss I could not go around, and on what I tell my students about shortcuts, it makes the case that the silence you buy and the silence you go through are not the same.

The Buddha described four kinds of students as four kinds of horses — one moved by the shadow of the whip, the next by the touch of hair, the third by the flesh, and the last only by the whip to the bone. Andrew H. Housley on the parable's strange afterlife: Shunryu Suzuki's argument that the worst horse may be the best student, Peter Gabriel's 2023 song that finds a fifth horse hidden in the original four, and what each kind of horse asks of us. From the Patoda Sutta to i/o.