One day I was walking in a meadow and saw a great blue heron just about thirty feet away. It suddenly poked its head down into the grass and came up with a large snake with at least three feet of its body still dangling from the heron’s mouth. The snake’s body was...

The 2009 Copenhagen Accord failed to become a robust international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases because negotiations fell apart. After that fiasco, the prevailing view was that international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases was a pipe dream. There were so...

Twenty years ago, my partner and I decided to quit our jobs, leave our country, and check into a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Kathmandu. We were determined to get enlightened, whatever that meant. I’d been active in the poetry community back home—getting published,...

“Each moment is astonishing radiance, full and round, without direction or corners, discarding trifles.”—Zen Master Hongzhi, twelfth-century China I’ve always wondered what time is. Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral? Is it solid, liquid, or gas? What is this moment?...

When I was a kid, it was the beginning of the Space Age. Each rocket launch was televised live on all the TV networks, and the countdown would fill our hearts with an intoxicating mixture of joy and excitement. Perhaps—for the adults who were watching—there was some...

Anxiety is an unwelcome visitor, showing up unexpectedly and making everything seem overwhelming. I know this all too well—not as a doctor or therapist, but as someone who has wrestled with anxiety for as long as I can remember. Early on, my way of coping with anxious...