Meditation

Vivian Rankin, who was among 300 persons who took part in Harmonic Convergence rites today at the Art Museum, has a quiet moment early this morning. The 300 was a bit short of the 10,000 event organizers had hoped for, but they were there about 6 a.m. for the chanting, humming and meditating they hope will help usher in a new age of human experience. The Harmonic Convergence began yesterday and ends today.

In Maria Novaro's tranquil study of skirmishes on the California/Mexico border, the garden always looks more profuse on the other side. To a gringa arriving in Tijuana, the foliage and local color there are much richer than where she comes from. But to a farmer she meets and falls in love with, the U.S. side of the border is the promised land. Novaro's loose-limbed Garden of Eden is part travelogue, part meditation on the fact that whales can freely move across the border without a change in species or status, but that people can't.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan is a traditional Chinese movement form, intended both as a system of self-defense and an aid to meditation. It came this month to the Juniata Park Older Adult Center. Instructor Andrew Heckert gave a demonstration on Oct. 19. Twenty-one people, ages 57 and up, attended, and a 10-week workshop in T'ai Chi Ch'uan began last week. The exercises that are being taught at the workshop emphasize balance over strength, and are characterized by slow, relaxed circular movements.

For all of his popularity on compact disc, Estonian composer Arvo P?rt - the best known among a school of Eastern Europeans called "the holy minimalists" - is surprisingly absent from the concert hall. His 1988 hour-long setting of the St. John Passion Gospel - titled Passio - is heard live so seldom that Friday's performance by the chorus Voces Novae et Antiquae and the Rel?che ensemble at the Trinity Center for Urban Life had the buzz of an event. The crowd was youngish and artsy, no surprise since P?rt's music echoes ancient chant so popular a few years ago. Also, the music is heartily accommodated by the electronic age, its spareness lending itself to recordings made in resonant venues where the sanctimonious silences have a shot at making sense.

Wearing a blue hoodie, pants cut off at the knee and tan sneakers, Wendy Carroll is on the run from her own sad life. In her 20s and alone, she pulls into a drizzly Oregon town, has car problems, gets into trouble with the law, and then loses her dog, Lucy. That's about the sum of what happens in Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy , except to say that somehow, thanks to an extraordinary performance from Michelle Williams and an exceptionally deft hand from her director, this low-budget and loping little film is a genuine heartbreaker.

"Sometimes the only way out," says Jenny Phillips, "is in. " That's the jailhouse mantra at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Bessemer, Ala. The barbed-wire-wreathed bunker resembles the cheerless pen in The Shawshank Redemption except that at Donaldson, murderers serving life terms don't break out. At least not physically. Mentally though, through a Vipassana meditation program introduced by Phillips in 2002, some Donaldson inmates are breaking the cycles of anger and revenge that got them there in the first place.

Zenlike in its mix of the serene and the wise, the whimsical and the jarringly odd, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is a beautiful, slow-moving meditation on life, death, and relationships that transcend time and space. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director whose experimental fusions of fiction and documentary have won a passionate following in international cinema circles, opens Uncle Boonmee with a dreamlike excursion into the woods, where a water buffalo lopes in the dark.

The Coatesville Area school board unanimously agreed last night to require district schools to begin their day with a moment for meditation. Coatesville becomes the only district in Chester County with a mandatory moment for meditation. Until now, Coatesville - like several other districts - had a policy of voluntary meditation. Speaking before the vote, School Board President Ron Scott said, "It is our duty to instruct and direct our children. . . . It's very much supported by the public.

Several people are sitting silently on blue cushions in a third-floor room, their legs crossed, their eyes closed. It looks like they might be practicing traditional Buddhist meditation, and in a way they are. But they're not seeking enlightenment - they're students in a stress-management class. And their teacher is not a Buddhist monk - he's a doctor at Graduate Hospital. What's going on in the room is part of a revolution in the medical profession. Eastern-style meditation increasingly is being used not as alternative treatment, but as one more tool in the doctor's medical bag. "There's nothing foreign or exotic about it," says Dr. Michael Baime, chief of internal medicine at Graduate, who leads the eight-week classes in meditation.

Six years ago, Katherine Handin was diagnosed with renal-cell carcinoma, a disease of the lining of the kidney that is often fatal. Handin beat the odds - more than 80 percent of patients with the disease die - and has been free of cancer since then. She credits meditation and faith with saving her life. "I wouldn't be here right now if it weren't for [meditation]," said Handin, a former promotions coordinator for Epic Records in New York City. "Instead of thinking 'I'm going to die,' I was able to say, 'I'm still alive, right here and now.' " Handin is teaching others the power of meditation as coordinator for Penn's Stress Management Program.

Lisa Miliaresis feels a special sort of holiday spirit. After death, "our loved ones are still here," the Mount Laurel psychic, 53, declares. "I speak [their] language. I view myself as an interpreter. " I meet Miliaresis, a grandmother who works full-time as a benefits administrator, at an annual event called Spiritual Continuum for the Holidays. Her friends Janice Gilpin, a Reiki practitioner who lives in Medford, and Kimberly Friedman, a meditation instructor from Marlton, are the event's cohosts.

Among the greatest prayers of Judaism is the   Amidah   , a recitation of 19 blessings that devout Jews say three times a day. Jews all over the world will recite the   Amidah   Tuesday night and Wednesday as they mark Yom Kippur, the solemn day of atonement when God is said to decide who will live or die in the coming year. Many will bow deeply as they face Jerusalem. But as members and friends of Mishkan Shalom Synagogue in Manayunk gather Wednesday for this holiest of days, hundreds will recite the Amidah not by bowing, but lying still, on their backs, in the yoga position known as "the Corpse.

The U.S. Supreme Court says you can be strip-searched even if you are arrested for not wearing a seat belt. Or you didn't leash your pooch. Or you forgot to use your turn signal. Or your muffler is too noisy. Seriously. It's enough to scare you straight. There are some chilling true-life tales tucked into the 40-plus pages that the high court published Monday after it ruled that strip searches may be necessary to ensure safety in jails across the land. Otherwise, the court said, people who are arrested and placed in the general jail population may smuggle in weapons or drugs.

Bruce Graham's fine new play, The Outgoing Tide, at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, is deeply moving and surprisingly funny, a straight-talking, unpretentious meditation on Alzheimer's and end-of-life suffering: "Quality of life. Kiss my ass. " Directed with invisible finesse and strength by James J. Christy, the excellent cast provides bedrock realism, refusing any of the topic's maudlin possibilities. The fact is, Gunner (Richard Poe), a tough guy who ran a trucking company and dealt with the Teamsters, is losing his memory and his mind; he still has enough left to plan his exit, refusing to settle for years of humiliating deterioration in a "home.

ST. LOUIS - Caroll Marlow, 71, said she has been rescued from clinical depression by researchers at Washington University who want to help people older than 60. After more than 40 years of living with depression, she said, experiences and feelings that are routine for most other people are new for her. She goes to lunch to laugh with her sisters; she's closer to her children and friends. She dates her husband. And she found a job. "I love it; I work a swing shift and I just love it," she said.

My friend Susan, having just relocated from New York, joined the school dance committee in order to meet new parents at her daughter's school. Eager to help, she made a suggestion about decorations at a meeting. What she got back from the parent sitting across from her was a roll of the eyes and a surly: "Um, aren't you new here?" "It felt like junior high all over again," Susan told me later. "I felt humiliated and angry, and yet it was over nothing. Part of me wanted to say: 'Are you kidding me?

Cutting-edge music declared too difficult to perform was, in the past, sent to Leopold Stokowski, who didn't need to understand pieces to conduct them convincingly. Now, conservatory students such as the Curtis 20/21 ensemble pioneer the unperformable, in this case Siddhartha's Dream by David Shapiro. From the Perelman Theater stage Sunday, the composer claimed this ensemble was among the few that could hope to handle it. Meditation music, it's not. Commissioned for the concert and presented in a laudable partnership with the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, the piece attempts to portray the Buddha's ability to see all of mankind at once - all seven billion of us. The piece circled the world in 18 minutes, each orchestral section having a sliver of a showcase, all from different harmonic universes that have only their anarchy in common, ending with a wild piano cadenza suggesting Stravinsky on crack.

A Novel By Julian Barnes Alfred A. Knopf. 163 pp. $23.95 Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler The Sense of An Ending , Julian Barnes' 14th novel, begins innocently enough. Anthony Webster, the narrator, recounts a few incidents from his school days, which were marked by his relationship with three chums and a girlfriend named Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford. Skipping past career, marriage, fatherhood, and divorce, Anthony reveals that he had settled, fairly comfortably, into his "more emptied" retired life in London, never indulging what-ifs, when he was confronted by his past, in the form of a bequest of 500 pounds - an apology of sorts - and two documents, left to him by Veronica's mother, Susan, whom he had met once, at a weekend in Chislehurst.

"SONIC DREAM space": That's what this 12-by-6-foot room is supposed to be. But at first glance it's just a small rectangular room, painted white, with a chair against the back wall. As the lights go down, and the music comes up, the room begins to live up to its name. The room, located in Jeweler's Row, is the home of the Sound Resolution Center. Equal parts meditation space and art project, the center specializes in 25-minute sound sessions meant to plunge a participant in a room filled with ambient music and changing lights.

In The How and the Why , two women meet, discover they are both (of all things) evolutionary biologists - at the opposite ends of their careers - and enter into a dialogue that reveals as much about their present identities as it does about their pasts. The How and the Why , robust and real in performances by Janis Dardaris and Victoria Frings, opened Wednesday night in a production by InterAct Theatre Company. The play, a two-scene piece with an intermission, was originally staged earlier this year at Princeton's McCarter Theatre and is written by Sarah Treem, the writer and producer of HBO's In Treatment . It's a smart look - the dialogue is especially taut and revealing - at these two women, one with a stellar career on bright automatic pilot, the other with a career that may become stellar if she doesn't snuff out the pilot light she needs to illuminate her talent.