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    Hard Travel to Sacred Places Paid Member

    By Rudolph Wurlitzer
    Burma This is Burma and it will be quite unlike any land you know about. —Rudyard Kipling The next morning we take the flight to Bangkok, and then the hour flight to Rangoon, or Yangon, as it's now called, the capital of the amazingly odd and oppressive country of Myanmar, which was formerly Burma. Even in the airplane we go through a time change. Everyone looks grim and shabby. The service is nonexistent, the plane old and decrepit. More »
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    First Cut Paid Member

    By Tom Drury
    I In October of 1994 my brother John and I drove from New England to Iowa to revisit the farm town where we had grown up. I was thirty-eight years old, John was thirty-one, and our mother, who lived in the town and with whom we would be staying, was sixty-four. I did not like being thirty-eight. Thirty-seven had been much better and thirty-nine when it came would be much better. Here I am only talking about the look and sound of numbers and not about the events that came in these particular years. Forty-one suited me, forty-three did not, and forty-four, my age now, is if nothing else better than forty-three. More »
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    Where Does it End? Paid Member

    By Noelle Oxenhandler
    How did the world come into being? A cosmic egg, a pair of primal twins, a primordial fog that separates into earth, sky, water.... Years ago I learned that, though there are thousands of different creation myths, they tend to fall into the same handful of patterns. How did you come to Buddhist practice? Here, too, the myriad stories tend to fall into a handful of patterns: there's the childhood wound, the remarkable coincidence, the long malaise, the sudden unsought joy.... More »
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    Mothering as Meditation Practice Paid Member

    By Anne Cushman
    For the first few weeks of my son Skye's life, he would only sleep if he could hear my heartbeat. From midnight to dawn he lay on my chest, his head tucked into the hollow of my throat, awakening every two hours to nurse. In the day, he'd nap in my arms as I rocked, a slides how of emotions—joy, exasperation, amusement, angst, astonishment—flickering across his dreaming face, as if he were rehearsing every expression he would need for the rest of his life. If I dared to set him in his bassinet, he'd wake up with a roar of oytrage, red-faced and flailing. He cried if I tried to put him in a baby sling, frontpack, stroller, or car seat. He cried whenever I changed his diaper. And every evening from seven ro nine, he cried for no apparent reason at all. More »
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    Precious Energy Paid Member

    By Nancy Baker
    Anger is a natural human emotion; it lasts only 15 seconds. So said the grief expert Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in an interview I once read. Unfortunately, when the human ego is involved, anger tends to last far longer. One of the most famous examples is the “wrath of Achilles,” the mega-anger that begins Homer’s Iliad and remains a theme throughout the epic. A recent translation calls Achilles’ anger “sustained rage.” It’s the sustained part that’s the problem. But shouldn’t we also avoid, or control, or suppress even the natural, 15-second variety? It all depends. Aristotle tells us that “he who cannot be angry when he should, at whom he should, and how much he should, is a dolt.” This suggests that in certain circumstances, anger is appropriate, justifiable—even necessary. More »
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    Sleeping with the Hungry Ghost Paid Member

    By Anne Waldman
    Hungry ghost, a morphology all by itself between our realmsHungry ghost: that dwells in consciousness, torments our desireSexy ghost, a performer, a demon, a gadflyTo never have enough be enough get enoughDancing on coalsIn a state of mind, bewitched, unsettled over what he thinks or she thinks, what they thinkWhat the “I” thinks: hieroglyph for the hungry ghostUnsatisfied—dancing on nails!Jostled by waves, the real kind, that pull you underTurbulent in a shadow realm between waking and sleepHungry ghost with sacrifices in the sand, hewn characters inthe mind, arms and legs that are brisk strokes of gestures in air, in language, flailing about, writing with the skeletal stylus of the hungry ghostSleeping with the hungry ghost who writes your book More »