Looking for Gold: The alchemy of Cinderella
Once upon a time, “The wife of a rich man fell ill, and when she felt that she was nearing her end she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, ‘Dear child, continue devout and good. Then God…
The Art of Budo
In my lifelong spiritual quest, I have read hundreds of sutras; plowed through pages and pages of philosophical texts; grappled with koan collections; analyzed thousands of poems; searched through biographies; meditated for hours; and interacted with many teachers, good and…
Testimony
The day finally arrived when my faculty advisor asked me to choose a topic for the Master’s thesis in sociolinguistics. What to do? Maybe some coffee and a piece of pie down at the Koffe Klatch would lubricate my imagination.…
In the Hands of the Sea
I went out into the garden, to the crag, and I sat on the bench and watched the light change in the sea; looking over the fields, the holy well, the standing stone. The mountains beyond the bay were blue with…
Out of the Dark Depths
“We used to bury our people down there, at the bottom,” said Mario, my twenty-something Yucatec Maya guide, a history major from the University of Valladolid Yucatan nearby, as he pointed at the cave’s dark mouth, dropping underground at about…
The Golden Ticket, by Tracy Cochran
Photograph by Peter Hershey One day a Buddhist monk stopped me on the street in Manhattan, offering me peace for the rest of my life. I…
You Would Run for Your Life, by Tracy Cochran
Viking ship. Photograph by Adrian Wallett A mother and daughter trace their roots to the Vikings—and to those they conquered “You would run for your life,”…
Kissed by Fire
As I walked out of the somber rooms of the funeral home into the bright August sunlight, carrying my husband’s ashes, I teetered between two realities: This, now, is him,…
Tracking Thoreau & Leopold
My most drawn-upon pieces of writing while working with adolescents over the past several decades have been Walden (1854), by Henry David Thoreau, and A Sand County Almanac (1949), by…
Playing With God, by Tracy Cochran
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…
“I Will Teach You” by Great Grandmaster Tae Yun Kim
Photograph by Republic of Korea Only a miracle would free her to live her own life As the following passage opens, the young Tae Yun Kim,…
Participators of Sacred Things, by Roger Lipsey
Vault mosiac, Mausoleum of Galla Placidia Participators of sacred things—the phrase is from St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian remembered today as the preeminent Scholastic, his…
A Week at the Hermitage, by Br. Paul Quenon, O.C.S.O.
Br. Paul Quenon Grace and glory at Thomas Merton’s refuge Photographs by Bill Murphy The hermitage in the following passage is at the Abbey of Gethsemani…
Abba, tell me a word
Abba Anthony was living his customary day of prayer and labor in the desert hermitage he called home when a band of seekers paid a visit. We are sometime in…
Where Do We Go From Here?
It is the opening day of the 2020 All and Everything International Humanities Conference. I sit on my meditation cushion, rocking gently back and forth to settle in as I…
Desire for Truth, by Roger Hawkins
Robert Orgera, Photograph of a Statue of Buddha, in Provocative Proximity of a Cage (Wikimedia Commons) One day, as a small child, I was struck by…
Sacred Time, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Time speaks in many voices, many different images and sounds. For the Neolithic builders of Stonehenge, sacred time was marked by the Summer and Winter solstices, particularly the Winter solstice,…
Who Decides History’s Future?, by Alexandra Zaleski
Knights and martyrs. Painting (detail) on canvas from church of Abbas Antonios, Ethiopia. Late seventeenth century. Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris In the Era of Princes, Abyssinia had no…
Remarkable Beings, by Eleanor O’Hanlon
Photograph by Laura M. Brown, Desert Elephant Conservation Among elephants, it’s a family affair Beneath the arid surface of northern Namibia run hidden veins of water…