Tricycle | Awake in the World

This is our eighth anniversary issue. One year for each petal of the lotus seat. Old enough to celebrate the slim odds of surviving the high mortality rate for magazines of any ilk, let alone of the singular independent Buddhist variety. Yet as a measure of time, “eight years” has no meaning. The experience of that amount of time is, on some days, very very long. Almost geologic. On other days, it seems just around the corner, as if the collapse of time might best be apprehended in terms of spatial proximity. Lately I’ve been counting numbers. Sometimes, I add up numbers in my head; sometimes, I count numbers on my fingers as if the comfort of counting like a child will release some primitive sense of passage. I think about dates. Birth dates, death dates. How many years someone was alive. Or how long ago some one died. How many years older or younger they were than me when they died. Or than each other. More »

I ONCE ASKED an Israeli antiwar activist how realistic her hopes for peace were; she had advocated a “one-state” solution in Israel/Palestine, expecting Israelis and Palestinians to live under one flag. Her answer caught me off guard. “How realistic is this?” she shot back, referring to the second intifadah, which was peaking at the time. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that peace was “neither absurd nor unattainable,” pointing out that “all other methods have failed.” In� More »