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Following the Line
Perhaps I was more open to the creative possibilities of cardboard because we’d gotten home, the night before, from two days on silent retreat. Perhaps the gift of not having to speak, of not thinking in terms of response or initiative or any other motive for uttering words, of openness that comes from hearing one’s internal chatter die down—perhaps all this created a space where I could get away from imposed....
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Near Miss
Sometimes it sidles up to you, out of the corner of your eye. You catch a glimpse and turn your head: Was that it? Nah. Like a mouse scurrying around that we don’t accept as an actual rodent until the fifth or sixth time we glimpse its tail flicker under the sofa, these initial glimmers of depression convince by accrual. And then there’s the other kind of arrival: Wham! Out of nowhere, front and center, on you like a dropped lead weight. The movie Melancholia features a blue planet....
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Unplugging
Over lunch on Saturday—Reuben sandwiches, a surprisingly delightful alternative to the soybean-and-lentil concoctions one might expect at a yoga retreat at a hot springs in Northern California—Craig and I talked to another couple about sabbath. Not in the way you might think, but in the way more and more people these days are talking about taking an intentional break from the Internet. Wilbur has neither....
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Back to School
When I was a freshman at UC Berkeley, I took a yearlong Western Civ. class. We began with the ancient Greeks and ended somewhere after Freud. (I probably kept that syllabus, the way I keep everything, but where?) Of all that I read and wrote about that year, here’s one sentence that has stuck with me: The surest sign of wisdom is constant cheerfulness. Michel de Montaigne wrote those words....
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Daring and Foolishness
Back in June, on the feast of Pentecost, in the chapel at the Bishop’s Ranch, instead of a Psalm, we read a poem called “tongues-talk,” based on Acts 2:1-35. The poem placed recognizable, familiar words placed together in a way that created more of wash of sensation than clear meaning. What to do with a sentence like the following: “is the ghost-groan a gift of incorporation / fixing prices on the scheme of sanctification / like salvation in a k-mart package?”....
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Current Issue
Issue 72
Memoir by Lauren Winner, Poetry by James Harpur, Art by Guy Chase and Adrian Wiszniewski
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