Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories
The Ghost Of A Boy
You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.
Body and Mind
You can belong to yourself, but it’s lonely, and you can belong to others, but there’s loss built into that, in uncountable forms.
One does not sit in order to become enlightened. One sits because, as the Buddha exclaimed at the moment of his awakening, one is enlightened as one is. The practice is simply a means of realizing this fact, which the ordinary, dualistic mind obscures.
We didn’t know what it was to be desired. We didn’t know what girls’ bodies were supposed to look like. We just knew it was better for us if nothing stuck out too far.
My husband, John, calls me a good mother. He says this with a glint of unease in his eyes, as though he is telling a lie or working a charm.
I practice a very special form of mindfulness called not-minding-ness. This has brought me…
I am waiting to turn left at an intersection. A driver cuts me off, we make eye contact, and I am caught in the endless loop of a memory I thought I had left behind eight years ago in Afghanistan. I begin to feel panicked.
Photographer Joseph Rodriguez grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and as a boy he watched the men in his family go in and out of prison. There were very few support programs for ex-felons at the time, and Rodriguez witnessed the difficulty his relatives had adjusting to life on the outside.
People have started offering you desserts in a way they think is casual, saying, “It’s just one bite. It won’t make a difference!” But it does. You can eat certain foods and you cannot eat others, and this is the only way you can feel OK. Losing weight is not the point.
