Featured Selections
From the Archives
The Ward
The first noise was hardly audible, like the whimper of a child so hurt that the wounds had to speak, a primal crying that went far deeper than language. The hurt had lost all anger and selfishness; it spoke only of its existence, incapable of any control, gurgling its rawness.
March 1992Californicated, Santa Crucified
I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a place that hasn’t been identified as a psychic window, and that includes 16 different cities and towns. Which means either that my very presence bestows some sort of divine grace, or else that some of these places are faking.
September 1979At The Heart Of Healing
An Interview With Stephen Levine
What we’ve really come to see is that healing is not limited to the body. The body may live or die, but the healing we took birth for occurs in the heart; if that quality of heart is not there, no matter what happens to the body, healing is absent.
October 1989The Silent Mind
An Interview With Jehangir Chubb
You don’t set up an ideal of what you want to be and try to become it. You become aware of what you are, and in that very process you become or realize the ideal.
July 1981What We Came For
They had to wait a long time for the harvest to begin. Gerard talked to Kate of nothing else for weeks. He imagined the two of them working their way across Canada, then down the West Coast of the U.S., picking fruit and living like gypsies.
October 1996Going Against The Dragon
An Interview With Robert Bly
Some dragons don’t want to be lifted up into the heart area. That’s their place down where they are. You go down and meet them on their ground. “I’m going to lift you up and bathe you in the violet light of the heart.” What do they care about that?
November 1983Instrument Of The Immortals
Miss Eva Hodges, my piano teacher for eight years, now deceased, would be gratified to learn that I bought the Steinway. She’d be proud of me.
March 1991What Miss Lena Prays For
Miss Lena goes into the dressing room, closes the folding three-way mirror, gets down on her knees, and prays. I wonder if she’s really praying for customers, as she tells me, or if she’s praying for bigger things, like peace in Yugoslavia, where she is from and which she calls Yugo, or maybe an end to homelessness. It seems to me you shouldn’t waste a prayer on attracting customers.
September 1998The Mayfly Glimmer Before Last Call
Jackie was nineteen, a cocktail waitress in Niagara Falls, New York. She worked in a bar on the other side of town and would come into our place with the other waitresses after her shift was up. Jackie was something else, the way she shook her hair.
November 1998Saving The Indigenous Soul
An Interview With Martín Prechtel
The Mayans say that the other world sings us into being. We are its song. We’re made of sound, and as the sound passes through the sieve between this world and the other world, it takes the shape of birds, grass, tables — all these things are made of sound. Human beings, with our own sounds, can feed the other world in return, to fatten those in the other world up, so they can continue to sing.
April 2001