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.