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Sunbeams

It is not drawn on any map; true places never are.

Herman Melville

Holding Our Power

An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé

The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.

Stones Of Light

An Interview With David Freidel

One of the wonderful dimensions of shamanism for me is its unleashing of the imagination, the intuition, and the emotion of a person, rather than allowing the banality of the material world to overwhelm one’s life. Making the life experience conform to the imagination is a great thing, and it’s something I would like to see our society pursue actively. Instead of simply consuming fantasy, we should generate fantasy, generate alternative understandings.

Portrait Of The Artist

I was painting on the night my mother died. Without realizing it then, I was saved by my obstinacy, my insistence on painting no matter what. Although painting has never been a replacement for tears — or for joy either — it was a healer for that moment.

Stepbrothers

Gays And The Men’s Movement

White male privilege isn’t confined to those who own banks, control empires, and manipulate governments. Even the freakiest-looking punk-rock anarchist is only a haircut and a costume change away from enjoying a white male privilege black men will never know.

Victory

In their letter to the weekly newspaper, the Klan hadn’t said what time they planned to arrive, just that on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination they would be in Churchill passing out literature and demonstrating. When I called around town to find out what people were planning to do about it, the consensus in the white community was that we should ignore them.

A Soccer Hooligan In America

We’re on this Greyhound bus heading down to an American football stadium in New Orleans for the England v. USA preliminaries of the World Soccer Championships. About ten of us all told, England supporters every last one.

Three Tales Of The Revolution

In 1913, my great-aunt Adela ran away with a boy intent on joining Pancho Villa’s revolutionary Army of the North. She was sixteen. The Revolution promised freedom from tyrants such as Díaz, Huerta, and her own father the rurales captain. Only her youngest brother did not disown her.

Race

The carpenters, The Supremes, the flowering vine planted at the base of a cross

The Fence Posts

Visiting my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in 1986, I was taken aback when a friend told me, “Go back to the States! We’ll have a war here. Serbs have lists of all the Croatian households. At night they will slit our throats.” I thought he was crazy. Now I think I was crazy not to see the warning signs.