Browse Sections
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Minding The Equipment
It is interesting enough, you might suppose, that a man goes out every winter, in the very worst of the Northwest weather, and lives out there alone for months at a time, all to take care of someone else’s heavy equipment.
August 1991The White Man’s Vision-Quest Journal
It was dark by the time we got to camp. I felt as though I were entering another time zone. There were campfires and tepees set up. (Just as you had envisioned, Sarah, when you predicted that I would be traveling to Dakota!)
August 1991Big Ideas
For a long time the whole idea of God is bewildering to a little girl, but in a dreamy and faraway fashion, you know him. Like the moon and the stars across the night’s long distance, you love and fear him.
August 1991Of The Brave
Bob’s friend Ken was supposed to meet him at the Internationalist around nine that very night. But when Ken opened the creaky screen door, he found Bob sprawled on the floor, bleeding and unconscious. He’d been shot in the head. Ken called for an ambulance and the police, and Bob was rushed to the hospital, but he never regained consciousness. He died the following day.
July 1991A Slightly Burning Bush
A personal visit from God could turn my life around. Then it wouldn’t matter that I was terrible at dodge ball, that I wore homemade dresses, that I didn’t have a Captain Midnight lunch box, that I had the lowest cookie-sales record in the Brownies. They’d point at me on the playground. That’s Ashley. God came to see her. Yeah. She told us all about it at show and tell.
July 1991Celebrating A Massacre
U.S. bomber pilots destroyed or incapacitated eighteen of Iraq’s twenty electrical power plants. The link between that and children dying today was explained by the Harvard team: “Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, waterborne diseases flourish, and hospitals cannot cure treatable illnesses.”
July 1991Confessions Of A Catholic Girl
We were seven years old. The Church believed we had reached the age of reason. I believed that when the priest placed the first holy wafer on my tongue, if I didn’t swallow it, if I could keep it from melting in my mouth, then when I stepped outside the church I would rise into the sky.
July 1991Living Through A Spiritual Emergency
Should I start with the apparent beginning, with that frozen January night when I felt suddenly dizzy and lightheaded, when my lungs tightened and my heart spasmed, when the malaria-like tremors began?
June 1991The Perils Of Self-Realization
A harmonious inner awakening is characterized by a sense of mental illumination that brings insight into the meaning and purpose of life; it dispels doubts, offers the solution to many problems, and gives an inner source of security.
June 1991Quaking
The landfill under the office where I work holds the decomposed bones of old ships and piers, derelicts not worth repairing, sunk in the harbor. Our building has piles sunk straight down to bedrock, supposed to keep us standing when the ground all around quivers and liquefies.
June 1991
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today