My daughter runs. She runs in the morning, she runs at night. Runs, runs, runs. People around town see her and go, “Look at that girl! She’s a runner.” But I know she’s more than that. My daughter breathes. She breathes in the morning, she breathes at night. Breathes, breathes…

There’s a great gardening book called “The Tao of Vegetable Gardening.” The author, Carol Deppe, applies Taoist principles (especially that of wu-wei, “not doing”) to the soil, but the book isn’t about Taoism. It’s all about gardening. The Taoism is rarely explicit, but rather merely laces, or informs, the book…

“Now I’ve got you, you nihilist! Sitting on your arse is precisely the sin against the Holy Ghost. Only those thoughts that come in walking have any value.” Nietzsche I remember reading a column by Florence King. I forget the topic, but in it, she wrote that she does the…

Check out last week’s episode of EconTalk: The good stuff is in the first 20 minutes. After that, the interview really gets into the weeds about the difference between growing tubers (which can be kept in the ground for a long time but rot quickly once harvested . . …

Manners are like fasting: their goodness isn’t readily apparent but you should observe them anyway. Manners are even better than fasting, though. Fasting improves you. Manners improve you and help other people. Let’s be honest: most manners make no sense or are anachronistic (based on cultural conditions that don’t apply…

The objection to a Communist always resolves itself into the fact that he is not a gentleman. It is not possible to engage in controversy with him as one engages in controversy with other men. He invariably hits below the belt if he can; indeed, his resentment is not so…

I love to spread wood chips. If I can find a tree company to dump a pile of fresh wood chips in my driveway, I have a difficult time staying at the office, I get so excited at the prospect of hauling them. The benefits of wood chips in the…

Part VI of an Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s Six Gnostic Traits (Part II of Two Parts) — All gnostic sects erect the idea of an evil structure that must be escaped or conquered. But there is no evil structure. As a result, any gnostic “reality” must instead become a competing reality that, in the end, loses, even if it destroys a culture and tens of millions of…

Plus: Seven Things I Did in the Garden this February — Gardening is a model of the brain hemispheres working together properly. That’s my theory, anyway, and why I named this Medium publication The Gardening Hemisphere. If you’re not acquainted with Iain McGilchrist’s “hemisphere hypothesis,” you can find a primer here, but in a nutshell: In a healthy person, the two…