Browse Topics

Sunbeams

There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Oleander

Marie loved the sun so much, she got skin cancers from it, which she perversely believed only the sun would help. Doctors periodically scraped or burned the cancerous cells off her face and arms, leaving her to hole up in her trailer for weeks listening to the radio until they healed.

Drinking The Rain

Then suddenly the dull light in the car began to shine with exceptional lucidity until everything around me was glowing with an indescribable aura, and I saw in the row of motley passengers opposite the miraculous connection of all living beings. Not felt; saw. What began as a desultory thought grew to a vision, large and unifying, in which all the people in the car hurtling downtown together, including myself, like all the people on the planet hurtling together around the sun — our entire living cohort — formed one united family, indissolubly connected by the rare and mysterious accident of life.

Sunbeams

I never get lost because I don’t know where I’m going.

Zen master Ikkya

December 1993

Bigger Than Words

Oh Freedom, I knelt at your feet but you said, Not now. So I threw myself at Love. Love said, Is it me you want, or Freedom?

Sunbeams

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence one becomes steadily the person one desires to be.

Anna Louise Strong

Sunday Before Thanksgiving

My Car

An unraveling marriage, a phobic non-driver, a father’s permission

Sunbeams

Nor is it certain how long you will live. . . . Your life is like the flame of a butter lamp in a hurricane, a bubble on water, or a drop of dew on a blade of grass.

Kalu Rinpoche

Small Victory

I crashed my bike once. I bought an R75/5 — my first BMW. I was told I had to earn it. I didn’t quite understand at the time.