Archive

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

The Desert Fathers and Mothers— and their culture of search

Frederick Law Olmsted’s village in the woods

Paul Reps (1895–1990) was an American artist, poet, and author best known for his pioneering book that helped introduce Zen to the West, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Parabola is honored to have the opportunity to […]

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares Ursula K. Le Guin’s “A Parabola Bestiary: Bear” and Eleanor O’Hanlon’s “Remarkable Beings” in this episode of Parabola magazine’s free monthly podcast

Understanding mercy as a force from on High

Previously unpublished commentary from Alan Watts, a pioneer of East-West spirituality.

“Some men believe in the power and value of suffering,” writes Thomas Merton. “But their belief is an illusion. Suffering has no power, no value of its own.”

Shamanic memories from an Indian visionary

The fiery path from light to light

The hidden teachings of a beloved fairy tale

Giving and receiving in a Bolivian marketplace

Fertility, birth and death, ferocity, protection, sexuality: all of these are surely aspects of the goddess, and not mutually exclusive of each other.

There are different kinds of realizations. They are not always lightening bolts but sometimes soft and slow, as if snow were quietly falling and settling.

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…

More than three-quarters of the way through this extraordinary biography (though that label barely captures this book’s breadth and richness) of the scholar of religion Huston Smith …

When I was young the silk
of my mind
hard as a peony head […]

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. […]

Making the world her own

A faithful companion

Within the chaos, a door to “the inexhaustible Now”

One August day recently in northern California, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee sat down with Parabola to speak about free will and destiny.

What we need is right at hand

Hamada, Leach and Yanagi in the United States, probably Hawaii, in 1952 “The institution of Living National Treasures was started in the fifties–when Japan’s machine culture was preparing to overtake ours–barely a hundred years after the West had forced the opening up of its insular, agricultural society. The title “Living National…

A story on homelessness, the deep woods, and wonder

She,
In the dark,
Found light
Brighter than many ever see. […]

Teresa of Avila—and grief—teach a mighty lesson

New York City At Night, ca. 1935 from Wikimedia Head down, hugging a grocery bag, I hurried past gutted buildings and empty lots, back to my ex-boyfriend’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It seemed like a good idea at some point, having dinner together as friends. But the little Spanish market on…

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 […]

Encountering eternity in the treasures of Egypt

A conversation with former prisoner and Buddhist practitioner Edwin Paragas

Searching for symbol in a world of number

Photograph: Girls exploring rock pools, Cameron Bay by State Library of Victoria Collections, 1909 “Religion isn’t for me,” announced my eight-year-old daughter, Alexandra, as we ate dinner together one January night. “I think of it like an old spider on the wall. I know that it’s there but I try to…

A universe of meaning in a small Parisian abode

An anonymous Buddhist tale translated from the Pali and retold by Margo McLoughlin

The Nobel winner with his muses

Two strangers, vehicles of the miraculous

Mary Oliver was an astonishing poet beloved by many and also a frequent contributor to PARABOLA over the years.

“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.”

There is a middle ground, a basic Reality embracing self and Self. It may be called my true nature. To discover what
prevents me from the experience of it, I have only to look at myself, just as I am. […]

Tracking J.R.R. Tolkien’s Keeper of the Forest

Lee van Laer, Red-Tailed Hawk, Piermont, NY Like the rest of the Parabola readership, I’ve been watching the developments on the borders of Europe — the influx of desperate refugees, the corpses of children — in a mixture of astonishment and horror. We live in what we believe to be an…

When two ecologists and biologists, who have spent a year together exploring the wisdom hidden in ancient Egyptian temples, decide to share their discoveries about awakening higher consciousness […]

Eight traditional ways to wholeheartedness and authenticity

Listening for an answer beyond words

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”.

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong  in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan.  The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking world, was on tour to promote her latest bestselling book.  Lauded by critics as “magisterial” and “magnificent,” The Great Transformation…

BLACK ELK, LAKOTA VISIONARY: The Oglala Holy Man and Sioux Tradition. Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos.

With a gaze of majestic power, the master electrified me with a glimpse of his cosmic consciousness.

As contemporary life becomes more and more fragmented and unsustainable, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. […]

Exploring the “hidden face of God”

Anonymous / Aboriginal

When you accept the state of being a stranger, you are no longer a stranger. […]

An encounter to last a lifetime

Bonding among the Juggalos

Betsy Cornwell shares Josh Boettiger’s essay on King David and Leonard Cohen, “The Poet and the Shepherd,” and Susan McCaslin’s meditation on spiritual journeys, “Guidance,” in this episode.

Was she “first among the apostles” of Jesus Christ?

Kuzunoha is a popular figure in Japanese folklore

Meeting a horse to find peace, war, and the sea

The idea of a “fall of man” is not confined to Christendom. Krishnamurti in his famous dialogues with physicist David Bohm on “The Ending of Time” asked the question: What went wrong in human life? …

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….

Awakening to ourselves and the world

In his book All and Everything, G.I. Gurdjieff presented what he called the “Obligolnian Strivings,” directives intended to instill in the consciousness of those who practice them—said to be engaged in the “Work”—the “divine function of genuine Conscience.”

America’s children are being robbed of their childhood. It’s as simple as that.

Listening to the Yao

One of some seven-hundred current members of Ready Willing & Able, the Doe Fund’s flagship training and sustaining organization, Joe will spend the next few months …

What our arboreal friends can teach us

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

One Autumn day in 1976 a question appeared: if I took a photo of something I’d seen that touched my feelings, would the feeling return later when I looked at the print?

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. […]

Intelligence is a quality available to choose, as a function of mind that can live itself through us. In this article, I will focus on spiritual intelligence as understood within the Western Monotheistic traditions. Here we will explore five forms of intelligence:  1) moral, 2) analogical, 3) intuitive, 4) imaginal, 5) esoteric. Before proceeding, a…

Photograph courtesy of Monastero di Bose “There must be monasticism in the twenty-first century!” So said a friend not long ago. Both his implicit protest and his conviction make sense. The landscape of the spirit in the West would be torn and lacking if the monastic way vanished in our time….

Researches into the source of megalithic culture.

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

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…

Story editor Betsy Cornwell looks at our Summer 2014 Issue, EMBODIMENT, in Parabola Magazine’s monthly podcast.

“Today we have gathered and see that the cycles of life continue.”

There once lived, in Fanti-land, a man named Father Anansi. He possessed all the wisdom in the world. People came to him daily for advice and help.

Mike Licht, Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple iPhone, after Paulus Bor The toy company Mattel has announced the release in Fall 2015 of “Hello Barbie,” the first Barbie doll to feature artificial intelligence. Through the toy’s wireless transmission of a child’s voice (“Hello, Barbie!”) to offsite computers, which will wire back a…

David Steindl-Rast (2004) Wikipedia The only point where one can start to talk about anything, including death, is where one finds oneself. And for me this is as a Benedictine monk. In the rule of St. Benedict, the momenta mori has always been important, because one of what St. Benedict calls…

A young woman navigates the roads outside—and within

“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…

Homespun advice to a young man in need

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. …

Tasting the forbidden fruit

When we least expect it, someone may walk up to us on the street and hand us a golden ticket.

This song comes from a place where the angels are present, where light is born, where the future is written.

Although it felt like flight, I knew the fall was wrong: body upended, working to right itself even as it spiralled head-first, it seemed, down. I’d gone over the tiniest cliff, from darkened footpath to an unseen recessed lawn. On my back, I looked up at faces—my husband Christopher, my step-daughter Miriam, a nurse who’d…

A guided meditation on being gentle with yourself when things are hard, with Parabola’s editorial director Tracy Cochran. To support Parabola’s mission, please consider donating. 

How the First People learned to cry.

Memorable encounters with an extraordinary being

From the Christian esoteric tradition, a path beyond the mind

A Sufi master looks at—and beyond—the approaching flames

Chatting with America’s favorite saint

Each summer I teach creative writing classes at the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth. It’s a wonderful job for many reasons: my colleagues are uniformly, eccentrically brilliant, I’ve taught at campuses all over the country, from Los Angeles to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and since the program is a sleepaway camp, the mood is…

The mystical heart of silence

The miracle is that the practice of presence not only enlivens ourselves, but allows us to share that new life with others and also to receive the presence of the Divine. It is the foundation for truth, and it is the genesis of hope. With practice, presence can, in the words of John G. Bennett,…

Sleeping. Louis Sussman-Hellborn (1828–1908) I’ve had quite a tumultuous relationship with fairy tales. The Little Mermaid was always my favorite as a child. Not just the Disney version, where everyone lives happily-ever-after, but the original, where the mermaid feels like she’s walking on a thousand knives and almost stabs the prince to…

Many things in the Philokalia are said about “passions.” This word has not quite the same meaning as it has in ordinary language […]