“The Rapids”
“But once he climbed over a mound about ten feet high, Theo saw a delightful rapids cutting diagonally across the landscape. The bed of this stream contained nothing but rocks, so the rushing water could only foam and seethe. It splashed atop a boulder, bent round a middle-sized rock, sped straight over smaller stones, and […]
Continue reading“Valley of Flowers”
“As he moved slowly forward, feeling more like a weightless spirit than a physical body, the seeker caught his first whiffs of the Valley’s scents. The perfumes of wildflowers, wild rose bushes, and wild strawberries wafted up and into his nostrils. Having always been highly susceptible to fragrance, he stopped walking and closed his eyes, […]
Continue reading“Santa Cruz”
“Small coves, whose pellucid green water revealed every detail of their bottoms, seemed about to yield up, at any moment, a lovely mermaid, her locks dripping, her tail slowly waving in contentment. Theo would round a curve and encounter a Monterey pine or cypress, hiding in its branches a cacophony of invisible birds. He would […]
Continue reading“Lesson of the Mountains”
“Such glorious natural beauty would have been hard for almost anyone to resist. It was as if the Himalayas existed to serve as the ultimate test for those seekers determined to rise above any and all attachments to which a human being might be susceptible. Theo saw the gnawed pink chocolate; he saw the muscled […]
Continue reading“The Miracle of Music”
“You are with me, my friend, as we watch music, in its incantatory beauty, rise from Silence to swallow whole our hearts and souls. There is the singer angled toward her creation like a goddess about to bring the dead to life. Behind her is the fiddler, his long hair flowing as he strums. Beside […]
Continue reading“The Visitation”
“Oh, such love poured out from the eyes and mouth and tilt of the head and lean of this man’s “body”! It struck Theo in this way: all the compassion in the world was now concentrated on him; all the tenderness in the universe was now spread over him, like a warm blanket over a […]
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