Archive

Lascaux Cave Paintings, ca. 15,000 BC Dreams and art are the smoke signals connecting the one tribe over time. Stories and myths do the same. Often we are so greatly taxed by circumstance that we lose the larger view of time and how we are always related, not only to those…

The trickster, the shape shifter, the god–the coyote

In February 2003, I went to Laura Rothenberg’s apartment to talk about her book, “Breathing for a Living,” which she wouldn’t live to see published. Laura was dying at age twenty-two. …

Reflections on the 2020 All and Everything International Humanities Conference and beyond

“The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics and Ultimate Reality” by John Spencer. Reviewed by Ocean Malandra.

In the old days, no one ever stole. Those who were well off always shared what they had. […]

Suppose we did our work
like the snow, quietly, quietly.
leaving nothing out.
—Wendell Berry

By being born, we all find ourselves on a journey of some kind.

In the beautiful woods of Newtown, Connecticut, a new elementary school is about to open. Pleasing to the eye and soul, this new school replaces the Sandy Hook Elementary School in which, on December 14, 2012, twenty young children and six adults were shot and killed […]

A fresh look at “the mad monk”

The Desert Fathers and Mothers— and their culture of search

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from the Fall 2021 issue of Parabola Magazine, Fire, including the lead essay by Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, “Fire Season.” Read the full issue by subscribing to Parabola. Parabola Magazine · Parabola Podcast Episode 50: Fire

A child visits her ancestral land

Listening for an answer beyond words

Από τη στιγμή που ιδρύθηκε, πενήντα χρόνια πριν, η κοινότητα του Bose ήταν προορισμένη να λειτουργήσει ως οδοδείκτης […]

Finding life between sand and sea

Inside an Ayahuasca ceremony

This episode shares excerpts from Parabola‘s current issue, “Mercy and Forgiveness.”

Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves….” As he lay dying, the Buddha gave this advice to his beloved cousin and disciple Ananda. I thought of it as I stood in a security line in the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, just after a male security guard gestured for me to…

How the Golden Rule can be the Golden Path

The Descent offers a chance to look clearly at tired habits of thought and action. A woman may finally admit to an addiction or see how some long-denied pattern of action has failed her time and again. The Return offers a chance for something to be born or recovered. A woman may reclaim a talent…

Searching for her place in God’s house

A conversation with Italian priest and spiritual guide Father Guidalberto Bormolini

Part of an Ancient Story: A Conversation with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Tsunemasa, Attributed to Zeami Motokiyo / Japanese Noh. Retold by Kenneth E. Lawrence, translated by Edward Kai Lawrence. Art by Kumiko Lawrence

A report from the new Goddess Spirituality

The language of life asks for our ears and calls for our souls.

A Report on the 2015 Parliament of the World’s Religions.

That a book on the Pyramid Texts of ancient Egypt has been favorably reviewed by the New Yorker is surely a sign of a significant cultural shift, but if you take the time to read this extraordinary book you will quickly see why. […]

In Vesali, in ancient India, at the time of the Buddha, a baby girl was born spontaneously at the foot of a mango tree in the royal garden. She was given the name Ambapali.

Love and compassion are qualities essential to our stature as true human beings, and jointly might be considered the capacities that most distinguish us from the animals, except that animals sometimes display more kindness towards one another—and towards people—than we do.

The long encounter of Thomas Merton and his Abbott, James Fox.

A conversation with wildlife educator Steve Karlin

How the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca created a fiesta of music.

Mark Nepo on welcoming the life-force.

“Often I have come across stern pronouncements directed at people like me: One cannot dabble, say the priests and scholars. Spirituality is not a tasting menu. “New Agers” who borrow a bit of this religion and a bit of that, while discarding the parts they don’t like, will never have anything but a shallow and…

The word [struggle] is of unknown origin; and although it is presumed to have come from Scandinavian and Germanic roots (there are no clear parallels or roots in Latin) the connections are uncertain […]

“All the world’s a stage.”

Indigo Animal is original, delightful, and profound. The artist, Rue Harrison, has given us wonderful characters in illustrated books in which she has raised the bar on a certain kind of content. […]

Mindfulness and the roots of war

For the last five or so years, as readers may know, I’ve been the poetry Editor at Parabola magazine, while also fulfilling various other duties as a Senior Editor. […]

Close encounters with a student of Gurdjieff

A universe of meaning in a small Parisian abode

Silas Hagerty was a young filmmaker in his twenties when I met him at a Servicespace retreat. […]

A mother and daughter trace their roots to the Vikings—and to those they conquered

“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote the Catholic poet T.S. Eliot. “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I follow two rules. The first is that my presence is invisible and silent. The film belongs to the storytellers. The second is to do as much research as possible, trust the material, and never film re-creations.

On silent retreat, a woman finds connection from PARABOLA, Vol. 37:2, Summer 2012: Alone and Together.

Cinderella slaves for years for her heartless stepfamily; Beauty offers her life to the Beast at her father’s request. […]

What we need is right at hand

A podcast from Parabola Editor, Tracy Cochran’s mindfulness meditation talk at the Rubin Museum of Art on January 6th, 2016.

I was determined not to let dialysis take over my life. But it already had. […]

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard at Arles, 1888, oil, on canvas (Puskin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow)One morning last October, I experienced a moment of grace. It happened as I was walking my black Labrador retriever, Shadow, on one of those warm autumn days when everything looks edged in gold….

When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

This episode of Parabola’s free monthly podcast includes an excerpt from David Ulrich’s Zen Camera on the joys of mindful photography and drawing, as well as Alexandra Haven’s essay on the wonders of ancient Egypt […]

Nassreddin Hodja was a real person, a Turkish Sufi, who died in the thirteenth century.

What makes the Wizard of Oz an iconic American tale that has entered into the language? Some expressions are so well known they need no further explanation, as for example “You’re not in Kansas anymore”.

Hope not as destination, but as the line we draw along the way.

The fiery path from light to light

Readers will find here an expertly assembled narrative—a chronological mosaic of the activities, inner and outer, of Gurdjieff and his followers, pieced together from the records kept by many. …

The remarkable story of A.A. co-founder Bill Wilson

Four Sacred Guardians

Every word I pick here | Is the wrong one, one | I’ve used too often, | Touched by thought | Until it’s worn and tired.

A conversation with Mirabai Starr

Walking with an Inkling or two

Gitanjali Babbar wanted to walk to the Freedom Tower. This cold day in New York City marked the end of her first trip to the United States. …

“The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation” by Richard Rohr with Mike Morrell. Reviewed by Patty de Llosa

I would first and foremost like to follow an age-old injunction that every writer, before giving out any advice or critique to anyone else, should obligingly give an honest account of their journey. So before doing an appraisal of the 27th All & Everything International Humanities Conference I offer a short yet pertinent brief. Having…

Born in India in 1918, B.K.S. Iyengar has been teaching yoga since the age of seventeen. An innovative and exacting teacher for more than sixty years, he has guided the establishment of many centers of Iyengar Yoga worldwide. His message is “Yoga is for everyone.”

Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. […]

King David, Leonard Cohen and the Search for Meaning

What our arboreal friends can teach us

An older Navajo runs for his people

The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali is the foundational and earliest text on yoga. Dating from about the fifth century BCE, it reflects an oral tradition in existence long before.

Naming Rumpelstiltskin, and the path to self-knowledge

TIMELESS IN TIME: Sri Ramana Maharshi. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

This story is so old we don’t know who told it or who it’s about, except that it speaks to all of us. We no longer know if it was a “he” or “she” at the center of the story. […]

“SYMBOL OF DIVINE LIGHT: The Lamp in Islamic Culture and Other Traditions” by Nicholas Stone. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

Reconnecting to the sacred, from a Sufi teacher

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

A leap of faith into an “intentional” community

A story on homelessness, the deep woods, and wonder

The seasons and the Cosmos

The first issue of Stopinder: A Gurdjieff Journal for Our Time appeared in the year 2000. […]

Verity climbed down from the scaffold and stood with me, looking up at his work. I murmured something about how otherworldly the statue looked. “I look for something other when I carve them,” he said. “They’re not connected to this world. They’re in another place, in their heavenly robes.” I was wearing the clothes of…

Photograph by Peter Cunningham The rain was coming down in sheets as I drove down a wooded road in rural Montague, Massachusetts, towards the opening ceremony of the Maezumi Institute, the new training center of the Zen Peacemakers Order. “The End” by the Doors was playing on the car stereo. “The…

All movies are an illusion. We think we are seeing motion but in fact we are seeing twenty-four still pictures every second. Half the time the screen is actually black. Yet movies seem so real, and some have the potential to reveal great truth. […]

How, indeed, could it be possible for a man, who is limited on six sides—by east, west, south, north, deep, and sky—to understand a matter which is above the skies, which is beneath the deep, which stretches beyond north and south, and which is present in every place, and fills all vacuity? —St. Gregory the…

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares excerpts from Parabola Magazine’s new issue, “The Miraculous,” including three new poems by beloved author Jane Yolen.

They say the legendary hitter Ted Williams could see the seams of the ball as it came out of the pitcher’s hand. …

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, The Prado, Madrid I think we tend to create inward forms of our own — adopted, that is, from things we encounter outwardly — and then stalk each other with them. This process is writ large on the social and political landscape;…

Bonding among the Juggalos

On true seeing

The Sufi Doctrine of Rumi: Illustrated Edition by William C. Chittick. Foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

Betsy Cornwell shares Ram Dass and Mirabai Bush’s “Going Home” and Emily Dickinson’s poem “Our Journey Had Advanced” in this episode of our free monthly podcast.

Parabola’s first issue, Winter 1976, included the magazine’s first interview. Conducted by then-editor John Loudon, it questioned religion scholar Huston Smith, author of the bestseller The Religions of Man, whom Loudon described as “a man who has traveled widely, but deeply, learning the many languages for what is primordially true.”

This was the time in his life that Abd el-Kader had intended to devote to peaceful pursuits such as prayer, teaching, and charitable deeds. He might have turned his back on the growing tensions in Damascus: It would not have been unreasonable. Yet he could not escape the world around him, or the role that…

A white rose opens in a quiet arbour
Where I sit reading Dante, Paradise
unfolding in me, opens hour by hour […]

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind