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.
The Titantic is split in two; it sinks. That’s the story of the Titanic. That’s my story, too, hitting the same iceberg again and again, and never quite believing it.
By Sy SafranskyJuly 2001Those three years of retreat were the hardest of my life. I’d been doing prison work for almost twenty years, but that one incident in Louisiana popped my balloon, and everything deflated. I had no energy. Had I been in a mainstream career, people would have pushed me to take Prozac. But I recognized that a very important spiritual development was occurring, and I needed to follow it to its conclusion.
By Derrick JensenDecember 2000In the moonlight, I study the face of the woman I’ve loved for eighteen years. I’m thankful the moonlight traveled such a vast distance tonight, just so I could see her sleeping.
By Sy SafranskyNovember 2000One bite at a time, I was being nourished by something mysterious. I was eating rain. I was eating sunlight. I was eating a piece of bread and actually tasting it.
By Sy SafranskyOctober 2000It’s been almost a year and a half since my book of poems was accepted for publication by a small press. This spring, I got a call informing me that the book would come out in the summer. Now, with only a few days of summer remaining, I am getting discouraged. Impulsively, I pick up the phone to call the publisher for news of my book. If I thought about it for very long, I wouldn’t call. I fear that maybe he has lost interest in the book or changed his mind.
By Judith AzraelMay 2000I am convinced, however, that the sexual problems of many middle-aged men are the symptoms of a spiritual crisis that has nothing to do with sex. Men are rummaging around in their small rooms looking for the solution — younger women, better gadgets, subtler techniques — when the real answer is outside the room altogether. It is a matter of discovering what sexual energy really is, something like what Roger Corless meant when he said that anything you do with your deepest energy is a sexual act. It is a matter not of looking for sex in new places but of seeing that sex is everywhere.
By David GuyJuly 1999Yet even here, at one of the more innovative schools in the country, graduation was still . . . graduation. Even here, at the end of the most violent century in history, graduates were exhorted in the usual ways to step across the mass graves and the poisoned waters and the broken vows. Step lively, the speakers told them.
By Sy SafranskyJanuary 1999I studied Ram Dass’s spiritual odyssey as if it were a map to some mysterious continent whose existence I’d only recently discovered. A year earlier, I’d taken LSD for the first time; I, too, had experienced a radical shift in consciousness as I’d glimpsed my true self, and tasted the glory at the heart of creation.
By Sy SafranskyMay 1998“With all due respect, Rabbi,” I said, “you are wrong. If I understand the term correctly, a megalomaniac thinks he is God. I, on the other hand, know I am God.”
By Rami M. ShapiroApril 1998When the cell doors slammed shut behind me, I found myself inside the first tier of the security housing unit. I didn’t know what to expect. I knew only that I had been relocated to what was considered the “crazy tier” by some, and the worst place in San Quentin by everyone. I was among the worst of the worst.
By Jarvis Jay MastersFebruary 1998Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today