Music Part 1

I am not as philosophically or literarily advanced as Proust. I believe smells DO take you back, but it happens to me so seldom that I don’t think about it that much. Songs, on the other hand, paint immersive technicolor exhibits in my head regarding the past I often never want to leave. I have

For a Moment

A million years ago, I was in an airplane with my seventh and eighth grade classmates, flying back to California from Italy. We were unbelievably lucky private school children who had just spent a week in one of the oldest cities of Western Civilization doing what eighth graders do–having fun but missing the full gravity

The Truths of the Heart

“It isn’t possible to love and part. You will wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal.”― E.M. Forster, A Room with a View Yesterday, I got an astrology reading from an

Softness in a Culture of Punishment

My favorite voice in Buddhism is a lesser known Zen “guide” named Cheri Huber. I discovered her ten years ago while staying at a monastery in Central California, between my sophomore and junior years of college. The monastery doubled as a resort in the summer and while I was there I was assigned to the

Reason for Being

Because my existential hubris is so enormous, I am going to tell you why I think we are here: we are here to identify with the suffering. Buddha will tell you that “life is suffering,” or “there is suffering” (they sound different to me, but both imply a very human denial of the existence of