Tag Archives: Buddhism
In Memoriam
They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War. I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in […]
Victory Number 360(2021)
I decide to get up, despite the mental miasma, the obdurate inner chatter: Mass extinction. Global warming. The pandemic. Everyone who died; everyone who will. Everyone. . How, neatly named and categorized, we proceed to hate each other. Though you did treat me horribly. I deserved so much better. The cat yawns, stretches. This again. […]
In Memoriam
They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War. I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in […]
Still I belong
Still I belong to the earth, the grass greening through spring snow, the white shoulders of mountains, the doe bounding and twitching vast soft ears that hear what I cannot. I belong to the early forsythia, bright with promise. To the late killing frost. I belong to the newborn finch, naked and blind, the jay […]
Instant
Cooking for one you bought the Mini quicker to pressurize but — you learn — slower to cook except when it’s not. Maybe it’s the altitude or mysteries no one can name that explain why proven formulas fail dubious experiments succeed though always the Bundtlette pan pleases making comely the humblest recipe causing you to […]
In the end you eschew Tupperware
weary of its modernity its synthetic architecture its obsequious convenience its not-quite-clear form trading transparency for durability and turn instead to glass cool and substantial pleasing in the hands sand soda and lime wed by heat to a hard clarity that will one day break with use spilling what it held but never hid reminding […]
Ephemeral
I was mortified to learn recently from an online calculator that my life expectancy is 94.64 years. That’s just, well … piggish. This is mostly not my fault. I have good genes and socioeconomic privilege. I don’t understand how to smoke, so I never acquired that vice. I am hard-wired for exercise. Also, I have done what I can to […]
Keeping busy
Not long ago, I wrote a relative in the chatty way one writes relatives, with whom meaningful conversations are apparently impossible, involving, as they might, honest emotion. She told me about the weather, and grocery shopping. I described what I had been doing, an unremarkable assortment of mostly pleasant activities: reading, writing, running, puttering about […]
In Memoriam
They were names I didn’t recognize, names I’d never heard: Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, Roger Allen LaPorte, Florence Beaumont, George Winne, Jr. Five Americans who, between 1965 and 1970, publicly self-immolated — set themselves fatally afire — to protest the Vietnam War. I am thinking of them on Memorial Day, when we traditionally commemorate Americans who gave their lives in […]
Praise
Springtime in the Rockies is characterized by nothing if not snow, and today was a bountiful testament. I could feel it in the light seeping though my bedroom window as I stirred and stretched — following the example of my wise cats — then picked my way gingerly down the steep bedroom stairs to see what […]
Meditatio Ephemera 