Adjunct teachers are the professorial equivalent of the migrant Mexican farm laborers hired during harvest. If you can get a good contract at the same farm every year, where the farmer pays you on time...

…and my coffee is Blue Mountain and I drink it black, which is unusual for a teenage girl, but it’s definitely the way good coffee should be drunk if you have any respect for the...

As I bathe myselfI pray with all beingsthat we can purify body and mindand clean ourselves inside and out.

Somewhere Dōgen wrote about the number of moments in the snap of a finger. I don’t remember the exact figure, only that it was large and seemed quite arbitrary and absurd, but I imagine that...

We were soldiers, but even before we were showed how to kill our enemies, they taught us how to kill ourselves.

Jiko: “Surfer, wave, same thing.””That’s just stupid, ” I said. ” A surfer’s a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?”Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water...

How much can you really trust the promise of a suicidal father?

Together we’ll make magic…Who had conjured whom?She seemed to remember Oliver suggesting this once before, but she hadn’t really appreciated the importance of his question. Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her...

I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.

It made me sad when I caught myself pretending that everybody out there in cyberspace cared about what I thought, when really nobody gives a shit. And when I multiplied that sad feeling by all...

Am I crazy?” she asked. “I feel like I am sometimes.” “Maybe,” he said, rubbing her forehead. “But don’t worry about it. You need to be a little bit crazy. Crazy is the price you...

Live. For Now. For the time being.

True freedom comes from being unknown.

The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist ? It feels like it exists, but where is it ? And if it did exists, but doesn’t now, then where did it go ?

Information is a lot like water; it’s hard to hold on to, and hard to keep from leaking away.

Like a small boat adrift in the fog, she caught glimpses during patches when the mist cleared of a world far away, in which everything was changing.

Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose.

Have another rice ball?

No matter how much bullying they inflict on my body, as long as I have this hope, I can endure any pain.

A name could be either a ghost or a portent depending on which side of time you were standing. The name Whaletown had become a mere specter of the past, a crepuscular Pacific shimmer, but...

I write this in the moonlight, straining my ears to hear beyond the cold mechanical clock to the warm biological noises of the night, but my being is attuned only to one thing, the relentless...

Do all kids have to worry about their parents’ mental health? The way society is set up, parents are supposed to be the grown-up ones and look after the kids, but a lot of times...

I felt so stupid and young, and at the same time something was cracking open inside me, or maybe it was the world was cracking open to show me something really important underneath. I knew...

You never know who it’s going to be, or what they’ll bring, but whatever it is, it’s always exactly what is needed.

There are lots of superheroes with different superpowers, and some of them are big and flashy, like super strength and super speed, and molecular restructuring, and force fields. But these abilities are really not so...

You got a choice, dude. We’ve all got choices. Lots of them. Every single second of the day we’re making choices. You’ve just been making bad ones, is all.

As she stared at the restless pixels on the screen, her impatience grew. This agitation was familiar, a paradoxical feeling that built up inside her when she was spending too much time online, as though...

She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. She missed people. She...

Time plays tricks on mothers. It teases you with breaks and brief caesuras, only to skip wildly forward, bringing breathtaking changes to your baby’s body. Only he wasn’t a baby anymore, and how often did...

When you beat a drum, you create NOW, when silence becomes a sound so enormous and alive it feels like you’re breathing in the clouds and the sky, and your heart is the rain and...

An unfinished book. left unattended, turns feral, and she would need all her focus, will and ruthless determination to tame it again.

Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering...

When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she’d never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too — the way she herself felt...

For the time beingWords scatterAre they fallen leaves?