When you hang around with truckers and sailors you learn the language of knots. Climbers and wranglers, arborists and roustabouts — they speak this language too. You can go anywhere in the world and find someone tying a bowline. It may be called by a different name, but it’s the same configuration: the rabbit goes out of the hole, around the tree and back...
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Last week, the Alabama legislature reversed a 1993 ruling that prohibited teaching yoga in the public schools. The new ruling came with a caveat: yoga okay, but no Oms, no namastes, no Sanskrit names for the postures. To call the postures asanas, which is everyday yoga-speak, that too would be a no-no, as would the practice of meditation, guided imagery,...
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In the late 1990s I traveled with a friend to what was then called Burma, and is now called Myanmar. We never intended to go to Burma; our plan was to explore Thailand, and perhaps move on to India after that. We even obtained visas for Egypt in case we still had itchy feet. I had never been to Asia, and in my journal I described Bangkok, where we landed,...
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Who among us has not been comforted by the words, Let me tell you a story? In my family it was my father who held the talking stick. He was not only a brilliant exaggerator, but he and his three brothers learned the gift of Blarney from their mother who learned it from her Irish grandfather who, we were told, did a short shift as the mayor of New York...
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My friend, Ann, suffers from dementia. This is the way I prefer to say it, rather than she has dementia. Having something implies an ownership of and intimacy with, a kind of never-ending entanglement that can but won’t be relinquished. It implies choice. If she has dementia, can’t she let go her grasp and unhave it? If she suffers from it, that’s her...
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