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the land of enchantment
My favourite place in the United States is undoubtedly New Mexico. It’s difficult to put a finger on it, especially after so long, but it really is the land of enchantment. Perhaps it’s the particular beauty of its desert, or the fusion of Hispanic and American culture. It has a certain aesthetic that’s hard to…
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Atheology, or Theology for Unbelievers
Theology is a strange discipline—that much I’ve learned in the two-ish years that I’ve studied it. One the one hand, I have found that theology can easily become, if you’ll forgive me, philosophically lazy, particularly when dealing in the theologies of revealed religions. I say this not to disparage it, but simply as an observation…
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Shantideva
“Sleeping, eating, and shitting.” Those were said to be the three realisations of Shantideva, who was an exceptional Buddhist monk famous for delivering the Way of the Bodhisattva off-the-cuff per the request of his confrères who intended to throw him out of the monastery. You might laugh, as I certainly did. It’s seen as uncharacteristic…
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two party nonsense
Orwell was a socialist. Maybe you knew that, maybe you didn’t. You’d certainly be forgiven for not knowing it. I find most of the people who bring him up nowadays are pretty far from socialism themselves, and so they superficially equate Orwell’s critiques of the Soviet Union in his two most famous works—1984 and Animal…
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aliens in our midst
Romeo & Juliet was a much better play than I’d remembered. So often when I saw it as a child, or when we watched it in high school, it seemed terribly cliché, though it must be acknowledged that the reason it may have seemed cliché to me was because the play was so impactful in…
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my samosa!
“That’ll be $3.75, please.” — “Wait, sir, here! Here’s three bucks. Just take care of the rest.” — “Oh, very kind,” I reply, as my unexpected benefactor gives me a smile and leaves. — “He’s a bit weird,” the clerk tells me. “He does this a lot.” — “Maybe so,” I said, and I wondered…
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Convenience Story Woman: A Review
Historically, I’ve had a hard time reading most fiction, but this last little while I’ve been getting really into Japanese literature. I’m not sure what it is about it: the themes, the style of writing, the other-worldliness of the stories—who can say? Perhaps it’s the fact that so many of the ones I have read…
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Familiar stranger
It’s a captivating experience to find yourself once again in a place you used to call home. It may look exactly the same, leaving you with the illusion that it’s only you who’ve changed. Or it may look different, and you’ll find something completely different, the ghost of an old friend or companion, contorted into…
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Child mind
Lately, I’ve been trying to be more mindful and present in the moment, and I saw something on the subway the other month that made me smile. It was actually pretty simple: just a mother and her daughter playing a game of “I spy”. The way they engaged each other was just so endearing! The…
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