A faithful companion
Category: Essays
In the Middle Ages people were well aware of the inexhaustible power that arises simply from sitting still. After that time, knowledge of the purifying power of stillness and its practice was, in the West, largely lost.
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 the corner of Ninth Avenue and West 35th Street was the only pocket…
“As I commute to work every day, I leave behind a quiet country road for a highway that takes me to the city. Nature still persists for a while, then gradually thins out, as I draw closer to a mechanical environment that encroaches on my whole being with its steel façade, its noise and quickness.…
It is not ignorance. Rather, one could say, a particular process of cognition that has little or no use for words. It is part of our heritage at birth, the infant’s first primer. And the young child lives by it, gathering into its growing body and aboriginal heart a cosmography of wonder. “The corn was…
“Most of us are like a fish caught in a hook. The Buddha is trying to reel us in; the hook holding us is our deep spiritual longing. We spend most of the time struggling, not wanting to be reeled in, not wanting to let go of all the things that we are desperately holding.…
“Before she could speak, my daughter taught me the language of silent things: fruits, flowers, an oaken chair. I came to understand, through my relationship to this small being, why the word adult forms the root of adulteration and adultery. Watching her, it became apparent that, as we mature, we fall from grace of the…
The night Nimo, Jay, and I arrived in Amritsar, India, we made a cursory survey of the Sikh Golden Temple, wandering around the outer area and meditating at its river banks. The next morning, we woke up at 3:00 A.M. to get there when friends recommended it was at its peaceful best. We waited in…
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 is the link between all forms of life: mitakuye oyasin, we are all relatives. In the Foreword to The Sacred…
Reading about Black Elk, Sitting Bull, Geronimo and countless other Indian tribal elders and chiefs made me regret that I would never know them. They had vanished and with them a way of relating to others we can call emotional intelligence. Not the intelligence that rates at the top of the SATs or earns a…