Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories
Girl Underwater
I was not afraid of alligators or snakes. I swam past them with some vague feeling that I was safer in the water with these creatures than on land with the humans.
Body and Mind
I was not afraid of alligators or snakes. I swam past them with some vague feeling that I was safer in the water with these creatures than on land with the humans.
I soon found out that the reservoir was where some locals dumped their unwanted dogs. I was there one afternoon with Sofia when a well-dressed woman stepped from a Mercedes and opened the back door.
The mistake 99 percent of humanity made, as far as Fats could see, was being ashamed of what they were; lying about it, trying to be somebody else.
It seems she was surprised to hear from me. “Marion,” she wrote back a week later, “I kinda liked you when I met you, and then I learned to love you, but now you’re just the skank that fucked my man when I was struggling to make a family.”
Einstein said that time moves at different rates throughout the universe. He must have been to Mexico, where time not only moves slower but has an altogether different texture and flavor than American time.
Anne Hallward On Breaking Our Silence And Overcoming Shame
We develop courage by coming out of hiding, coming out of the closet, and there are thousands of closets.
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.
