Cover image: “Lemons” by Jennifer Caloyeras
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“You may feel that you have a good vision for society but that your life is filled with hassles—money problems, problems relating to your spouse or caring for children—and that those two things, vision and ordinary life, are opposing each other. But vision and practicality can be joined together in nowness.
Too often, people think that solving the world’s problems is based on conquering the earth, rather than on touching the earth, touching the ground. That is one definition of the setting-sun mentality: trying to conquer the earth so that you can ward off reality. There are all kinds of deodorant sprays to keep you from smelling the real world, and all kinds of processed food to keep you from tasting raw ingredients. Shambhala vision is not trying to create a fantasy world where no one has to see blood or experience a nightmare. Shambhala vision is based on living on this earth, the real earth, the earth that grows crops, the earth that nurtures your existence. . . . Even though you may be living in a city in the twentieth century, you can learn to experience the sacredness, the nowness, of reality. That is the basis for creating an enlightened society.”
― Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche,
in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior
Featured Selections
Joanna Baxter
Casey Catherine Moore
What Persephone Taught Me
I can survive amid summer wildfires.
Where I can’t see, but still perceive,
with singed hair and crimson eyes,
mind and body constantly reeling,
and a throttling pulse I never stop feeling.
I can survive under winter darkness.
When my leaves are gone,
the ice rain is heavy,
I am unsteady,
and my branches freeze
and fall to the Earth
with a thunder crack.
I’ve survived through fires and floods,
hurricanes and tornadoes,
summer volcanoes,
and the days and weeks without rain
when the shakes begin to addle my brain;
and through long winter nights
when the ice enters my bones,
and flash-freezes me within my mind alone.
I am
I am still
I am still here.
I survive by soaking up summer sun
to radiate later from my skin
and by saving winter ice under my tongue
to cool my core on the Dog Days
when everything rages within.
My roots always burrow deep into Earth,
sending sweet fruits of Ceres
up through my feet, into my trunk, and out
to my fingertip branches and wearied leaves.
I am
I am still
I am still here.
Surviving the seasons made me know
the strength of the root.
Amy Wellman Edwards
Mary Paulson
Ties That Family Binds
The words I speak, I know, you know are heartfelt. Still, I see them bounce off you, your radius deftly protected by a kind of anti-aircraft technology. It happens, not because you’re unkind (you’re not) but because I suspect their sound is too much like a song interminably repeating across radio channels. You know, I know it’s just like when your hand shoots out to change the station, that reflex to block the intrusion. And while my words are not equivalent to some jarring aural assault, I imagine they scrape disagreeably against the soft pink interior of your non-objective ear. When you hear me saying “sorry” I know, you know, I mean it. Your resistance—it’s just instinct really, a sensible shield from doubt, emotional dissonance, a threat to your near certainties. When we’re in this kind of stand-off, I wonder if you know what I know—we’re two bodies glue-stuck at the heart and for that, there’s no defense.
Jaina Cipriano
Siobhan Tebbs
A False Separation
Celestial bodies emerge
in a slow motion filmic seep,
nightly flickering majestic.
A trillion eventual nothingnesses
shining, some faster than others,
multiplying on closer inspection.
Conjuring thoughts:
our usual vantage point
what life there may
whether it would welcome
I – in it. It – in me.
A false separation.
Inside my heart is a constellation
finding a grain of time to glow.
Sean Gallagher
