These days seventeen-year-old boys discuss plans to attend college, not only to further their careers, but as a way to avoid the draft. My son and his friends see Iran as a real threat to their lives. They hear about British soldiers held captive in the Persian Gulf, Iranian forces captured in Iraq, and Iranian-American [...]
While waiting for my son to finish his guitar lesson, I sat listening to two mothers talk about their children. At first I tried to continue reading, but their voices carried over the tooting trumpet and rattling drums, so I gave up, and paid attention to them instead.
Not wanting to appear nosy, I opened [...]
Did you know that elephants mourn their dead? They have even been known to linger over the bones of fallen humans. They live in matriarchal societies that stay together for generations. The grandmothers and mothers teach the young female calfs how to care for their younger siblings. Animal behaviorist Katy Payne has written about elephants [...]
When Descartes proposed his syllogism, Cogito ergo sum in the 17th century, his words became the leit motif of the Age of Reason. I think therefore I am continues to influence Western thought to this day.
The Buddhist concept of human consciousness denies the existence of a self that is one and the same with the [...]
In 1621, the Englishman Robert Burton published The Anatomy of Melancholy. He himself suffered from depression, and states in his book that he was writing about the disease in order to cure it in himself. He outlines many causes of chronic despair, from the stars and planets, to temperament, heredity, and witches.
He also offers several [...]
We dropped our bags near the cedar reception desk, gleaming in the last rays of the sun. It stood in an open-air building made of whitewashed stones. The cone-shaped roof was thatched in the palapa-style, a Mayan invention. It was dusk when Sergio, the concierge, met us and said, “Welcome to Hotel Xixim.” He [...]
The day after Christmas darkened. The rain left black streaks on the trees trunks and the air was cold and damp. Retreating to my safe, cozy home seemed like a much better plan than traveling to Mexico. Sean and I drove that day to the notary public to sign our wills, which added to my [...]
Last fall depression haunted me. It froze my heart, it deprived me of sleep, it banished me from a decent meal. My usual wanderlust shrank, until a mere walk around the block with my dachshunds demanded great willpower. During the weeks of my recovery, I conjured images of my [...]
Spilled Milk
By Christine Swint
It was the smallest provocation that set me off. My twelve-year-old son Casey was helping me bring the groceries up the stairs from the car, a boring task. At the top of the stairs he started swinging a gallon jug of skim milk. When he reached the kitchen, he had turned himself [...]
The film Into Great Silence defies typical genres. It’s billed as a documentary, since it details the lives of the Carthusian monks who are cloistered in the Grande Chartreuse monastery, in the French Alps. But the film becomes more than a chronicle of lives. The images and scenes string together like beads on a rosary, [...]
