Borders

It doesn’t matter how you treat a dead body. The dead wasp I vacuumed off my floor yesterday is just as dead as my great-grandfather– as far as science can tell us, anyway. Death means a lack of mattering. I appreciate how Buddhists try to get us comfortable with that, impossible as it may be. […]

Mummified

For all we know, the soul of Perneb is wandering around, flustered, like a smoker without a Quik Trip at 3 am. Perneb believed, or at least some of his friends and family believed, that he needed a tomb with a false door to keep his soul nourished. Unfortunately, Mr. Edward S. Harkness gave Perneb’s […]

Apology

You have to understand: he doesn’t mean it. It’s what he has! Remember, too: scorpion’s tail is nearest his own head. Pinchers are all he’s got to grab with. Did he hurt you? Consider: wasn’t he born ugly? Piddly legs he can actually use Rockettely, and he would grow a moustache to make you laugh… […]

Swimming In It

Trouble will come on its own, and there is no fancying it a stimulant to one’s creativity…. The clean and simple appreciation of ordinary, daily things, is a treasure like none on earth. –Kathleen Norris, The Virgin of Bennington I was wary about participating in this workshop on Holocaust education because I knew it was […]