Archive

A visitation in the night

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

Despite acclaim, even adulation, garnered from his theater and film work, including such classic films as The Holy Mountain and El Topo, the author found himself in a state of doubt—of spiritual questioning. …

An older Navajo runs for his people

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

A conversation with Kabbalah expert Rabbi Dr. Raphael Shuchat

A child visits her ancestral land

Homespun advice to a young man in need

Eight traditional ways to wholeheartedness and authenticity

As my prayer become more attentive and inward
I had less and less to say.
I finally became completely silent. […]

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

The soul, like the moon,
is new, and always new again. …

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;…

The greatest shocks can inspire the deepest wisdom

How deeply we fear being nobody. One way to think of the ego is as a defense against pain, particularly the pain of being no one.

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…

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”.

A life-changing encounter with spiritual authority

Frederick Law Olmsted’s village in the woods

Dr. Joseph K. Dixon, A Native American sends smoke signals in Montana, June 1909, National Geographic Creative. The sacred pipe of the Native Americans is a potent symbol of relationship. Through it the human breath sends to all the six directions the purifying smoke that connects the person to the divine and…

Stephanie Unger is a writer who lives in Buffalo, NY. She has studied poetry at workshops led by Martha Heyneman and others at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

Reaching an understanding that no storm can shake

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…

Story editor Betsy Cornwell shares Margaret Delaney’s “The Anonymous Ones” and “Gastronomy in Ancient China” by Donald Haper in the latest episode of our free monthly podcast.

“Give it one week of hard frost,” my new husband says, “and all the green will be gone.” He has slowed the car to let two adolescent does cross the road, and we watch them vanish neatly into the ditch on the other side. […]

The photo project “Icon and Mirror” by Pola Rader analyzes the Orthodox woman and her social role in feminist context.

A Trappist monk’s sojourn at Thomas Merton’s hermitage

Story editor Betsy Cornwell explores our current issue, Generosity and Service, in Parabola‘s monthly twenty-minute podcast.

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…

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

How the Golden Rule can be the Golden Path

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

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

In my mid-thirties I found myself in Dante’s dark wood, where my way was entirely lost.  My marriage was falling apart.  My primary mentor, Reynolds Price, seemed to be dying of a weird spinal cancer that was slowly paralyzing him.  My visits to him brought up visits I’d paid to my father in the hospital…

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. …

When most of us think of determination, we think first of imposing our will on the world, insisting on a particular outcome, our vision. Yet real determination appears when we keep going, surrendering what the ego wants, which is always to look good, to sound good, to win. Real perseverance is willingness, not will. […]

An interview with Keith Buzzell

A free PDF of our ALONE & TOGETHER issue from summer 2012 to read in these challenging times.

Stephanie Unger is a writer who lives in Buffalo, NY. She has studied poetry at workshops led by Martha Heyneman and others at the Rochester Folk Art Guild in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State.

“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.”

Being “old” in Bali

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

Three notable biographies from the Gurdjieff Work

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

Within a Mayan burial cave, understanding comes

Among the tasks or “yogi jobs” a participant can volunteer for during silent retreats at the Insight Meditation Society, a Buddhist meditation center in rural Massachusetts, the most resonant in every sense is that of bell ringer.

Anonymous / Jewish Retold by Maia Zelkha

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

A rapturous elegy to love

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

Learning to love winter’s night

Joshua Boettiger, “Alone, with Others”

Chatting with America’s favorite saint

“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.”

The fiery path from light to light

A story on homelessness, the deep woods, and wonder

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…

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 […]

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.”

A spiritual master on what it takes

In a world on fire, finding the light that guides

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. […]

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. […]

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…

A conversation with visionary philanthropist Nipun Mehta

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 […]

Awakening to ourselves and the world

A Sufi master on finding balance in an unstable world

Seeking the divine.

Guidance for our time from three wise men

Impressions from the land of Rumi

In mid-August 2015, Viral Mehta, a co-founder of ServiceSpace.org, was diagnosed with an acute form of bone marrow suppression. In the passages below, his wife, Pavithra. “Pavi” Mehta, offers an update on Viral’s condition and speaks with him about his challenges and recovery.

How can religious tradition be literally true when language is symbolic, intrinsically?

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. […]

To meet her destiny, she needed a miracle

Looking back, I see my five years in India as the high-point of my diplomatic life, and my most memorable time in India as the four days in January of 1971 before Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s official visit to India. […]

Hammarskjöld, Havel, Mandela, Thunberg

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.

Story editor Betsy Cornwell and Parabola intern Surnaí Molloy read excerpts from the Summer 2021 issue, Young & Old, in this episode of our free podcast.

In the early 1980s, jazz pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane devoted herself to the Hindu tradition, adopting the name Swamini Turiyasangitananda and established the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram outside Los Angeles.

A visit with the famed nun and art historian

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 …

The trouble with goats

Encountering Henrietta Lannes

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 […]

Roland W. Reed, Alone With the Past, The Life and Photographic Art of Roland W. Reed, Afton, MN: Afton Press. In terms of interconnections, a dominant theme in all Native American cultures is that of relationship, or a series of relationships that are always reaching further and further out; relationships within…

The hidden teachings of a beloved fairy tale

Tobias and the Angel, detail of painting by Raphael. National Gallery, London. From Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). A Hebrew Myth, a potent element in the annals of the bees, tells us that when a child is born an angel takes it under his wing and recites…

Elie Wiesel died Saturday, July 2, 2016 at his home in Manhattan. The Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner was 87. In May of 1985, we interviewed Elie Wiesel for our “Exile” Issue.

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…

Laozi, Investiture of the Gods at Ping Sien Si, Pasir Panjang, Perak, Malaysia Photograph from the Ping Sien Si Temple in Perak, Malaysia taken by Anandajoti. My father had many good qualities; unfortunately, equanimity was not one of them. Known for a ferociously bad temper, he once threatened a one-armed theater…

A young woman finds her way.

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.

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

Going to the movies, mindfully

A powerful remembrance of war and peace

Helen Berger, “A Shift in Vision”

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

In April 1976, Mother Teresa spoke before the United Nations. The following day, she was interviewed by spiritual teacher and radio host Lex Hixon. What follows are some of Hixon’s introductory remarks and a brief portion of his rare interview with Mother Teresa.