We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
A Zen Buddhist monk in my tradition gets exactly one week off a year. This time is specifically designated for a “family visit.” I always take my week at Thanksgiving, and every year I prove right that old Zen adage: Think you’re getting closer to enlightenment? Try spending a week with your parents.
By Shozan Jack HaubnerSeptember 2011A sailboat, a last request, a pair of monarch butterflies
By Our ReadersAugust 2011“They say that sometimes birds sing to attract a mate,” he told Renee, “but often they sing just because they love it. They love the way it sounds and the way it makes them feel. It delights them.”
By Christian ZwahlenAugust 2011She looked as though she’d been jolted by electricity, her beautiful brown eyes alive with surging energy but puffy and gray underneath. At times her zest to complete tasks frightened my brothers and sisters and me, and I’d hide from her, even though I liked to help her cut out pictures for collages.
By Doug CrandellJuly 2011In the spring of 1932, when I was twelve years old — the last year of my childhood, as I understood it — my grandfather left the farm and came to live with us. His wife, my mother’s mother, had just died, and he could no longer get loans to keep the farm going. My father had already given up farming a few years earlier, and we were living in the village outside the Bell cotton mill.
By Jon SealyJune 2011There are some things you can’t understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It’s good that you’ve worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand that these issues will need to be resolved again. And again. Some things can be known only with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of them have to do with forgiveness.
By Cheryl StrayedJune 2011Being laid off, going deer hunting, getting a divorce
By Our ReadersJune 2011“The thing I remember most about watching my mother’s body burn,” my mother tells me in English, a language that has never quite served her, “is when I can smell her skin and hair as they are catching fire and crackling in the flame.”
By Jaed Muncharoen CoffinJune 2011This book I’m reading now my mother read / and loved. You can get this close to the dead / and no closer.
By Paul HostovskyMarch 2011Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today