When I was a small child, I inhabited, as most children do, a vivid imaginal world. But the products of my imagination weren’t created from inside my head: my imagination took flight as a result of my interactions with the physical and sensory world around me. The pitchfork-shaped, steam-spewing industrial structures which I could see across the river from where…
Being an immigrant to the US, a person of color, and genderqueer, much of my life I never felt I belonged fully to any particular group or community. A coping strategy I learned early on was to conform to the dominant culture so that I didn’t stand out with the hope of being accepted and loved. That stopped working for…
There’s an iconic scene in the movie There’s Something About Mary in which Ben Stiller picks up a sketchy hitchhiker played by Harland Williams. Williams tells Stiller about a groundbreaking idea he’s had. “You heard of this thing, the eight minute abs?” he asks. “This is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: seven minute…
The trail through the snow was easy enough to follow at night, without a flashlight to show the way. Pausing occasionally, I’d wait until my eyes could discern the subtly darker shadow that snaked through a stand of fir and pine: a trail carved by my boots and supplemented by occasional moose, maybe elk or coyote. On the blackest nights,…
“And so, kids, if you don’t find this awesome new game under the tree you’ve really got to ask yourselves what you’re doing there.” – New Yorker Cartoon Take a moment to reflect on what “the holidays” mean to you–whatever ones you celebrate and all the other parties that crop up this time of year. Or what they could mean,…
Here is a modern koan: two friends decide to meditate alongside a dog named Jules. It is immediately apparent that Jules is unsettled by the sight of two humans sitting completely still. She begins to nudge these humans; gently at first, and then with more insistence, as if to say, snap out of it! After a few restless minutes, Jules…
“…[I]f you are painting my song the way I sing, then it would be like a sky with drifting clouds without having to wonder about the borders in the clouds. So there [are] infinite possibilities in that space of how many different shapes of clouds that will form, or how many clouds that you won’t see… A lot of the…
We think we make them up, the myths, stories and dreams which so richly define the human imagination. But what if they have an existence that’s independent of us? What if they come to us as psychopomps–a beautiful old word of Greek origins which means “soul guide”? How then do we learn to listen to them, to see them, and…