Body and Mind
The kindness of strangers, the vicissitudes of life, the merry-go-round at the mall
Now I believe in everything. Aromatherapy: peppermint and sandalwood and lavender and especia…
In 2001 I was twenty-four years old and visiting Paris when I bought a really great pair of pants. They were red and silky and had dragons and Chinese symbols embossed on them and cost only sixty francs, which wasn’t a lot, about eleven dollars. I bought them on the street from some hippie Romanian woman. (I don’t actually know where she was from, but she seemed Romanian.)
It’s not enough to be gentle with those who are like us if we can’t find it in ourselves to be kind with those who are less fortunate than we are. The true test of our compassion lies in our ability to have concern for those least like ourselves.
Of course there is a time of afternoon, out there in the yard,
an hour that has never been described.
My mother is a wood thrush, and my father is a great snipe. They aren’t my parents in this utopia. They’re birds who met once, then drifted apart, as birds do, so they could lead their own lives and become who they were meant to be. They have no children, bird or otherwise, tugging them in a different, boring direction.
Bugs In A Bowl Han Shan, that great and crazy, wonder-filled Chinese poet of a thousand …
There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.
I am troubled by my shapeless fears. My God, these anxieties! Who can live in the modern world without catching his share of them?