Browse Topics

Selected Stories

She grew up and retreated into a tower, where she lived for 20 years. No one understood this. Her friends thought perhaps she’d gone mad. When she emerged, she could fly. Everyone was very impressed, watching her fly over the sea.

Cholestiatoma

Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.

Sunbeams

It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.

Alfred Adler

Seth On Suicide

Seth’s oceanic desire is to remind us that no death comes unbidden, that death is as spontaneous a creation as our own lives, engineered by our beliefs, which, no matter how distorted, cannot destroy in some final deed of discipline the impulse to be.

Celebrating Seth

Seth is an elder but an equal, who insists, “Basically you are no more of a physical being than I am, and I have donned and discarded more bodies than I care to tell. . . . Consciousness creates form. It is not the other way around. . . .”

Sunbeams

Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at a never-ending sunset. “Dying is no solution,” he affirmed. “And living?” I asked. “Nor living either,” he conceded. “But, who tells you there is a solution?”

Elie Wiesel

An Interview With Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

I think it is true there is a much more authentic sense of spirituality than ever before, that’s the promising thing — less conformity and less attachment to rituals and forms and absurdities and movements and societies and robes and beards and all the rest.

There Is No Time

There is no time. Every moment is now; every moment is every moment that ever existed and ever will exist. But because this particular form in which we find ourselves at present can only ride one impulse at once, it seems to us that indeed time is a ball-bearing rolling down a tube past 1960, then 1970. Jump off an impulse; call the jump death. Land upon another; call the landing rebirth.

Monsters: A Trilogy

Christmas Emission

What to do next, we wondered. If our eyes met theirs across the dinner table, we might burn holes in their retinas. We might muscle a plug of ghastly recognition into their brains and sear their genetic codes with the breath of the big white god who breathed through us.