My local yoga studio just closed. I’ve known the day was coming, as much as I’ve tried not to think about it. I’ve become used to rolling out of bed at nine on a Saturday morning, throwing on appropriate garments (not too loose, not too tight), inhaling a cup of coffee, grabbing my yoga mat, and making it to the nine thirty class in time to be seated in proper cross-legged position (shins parallel, hips higher than knees) for the... Read more
In a public library, there waited The Hobbit. And in a cineplex, there screened The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. These two things are related. But only somewhat. I vividly remember Mrs. Tuttle, a children’s librarian in Portland, Oregon, putting a book by J. R. R. Tolkien in my hands when I was only seven years old. The book began simply, introducing me to a hobbit and his habits. Bilbo Baggins was a likeable, fastidious fellow, fond of good food, smoking,... Read more
By Shannon Huffman Polson I went alone that Christmas to a place far away from any one or any place I knew. Two mountain passes and four hours of driving, and a flat gray lake absorbing the wake of a rickety ferry fell behind me, and I sat with my head against a school bus window bumping up a dirt road into a snowy mountain valley and arrived to an unlocked dorm room with a single bed and white walls... Read more
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning since August I’ve walked a long wooded path to reach the building where I teach College Writing to a group of freshmen. Over the past four months, the landscape has changed. In August the heat of summer still lay heavily over everything, like a panting dog. The forest underbrush was so thick it looked impenetrable, and I couldn’t see whatever small animals made sounds within it, so that sometimes, when alone, I frightened myself... Read more
My boy is a bit of a science geek. He subscribes to Discover and Popular Science. They are both styled after the fashion of other pop magazines in an attempt to appeal to non-scientists (“Cold Fusion: A Special Investigation”). Popular Science focuses on technology. The past year’s issues have featured an invisible, invincible war ship, faster racecars, the ultimate scuba system, elevators with speeds of forty miles an hour. And there’s the new no-pulse mechanical heart that has revolutionized heart... Read more
The San Francisco International Airport has a yoga room, but no chapel. At least that’s what it looked like, when I was there a couple of weeks ago at six o’clock in the morning: The Yoga Room was obviously a point of pride, with extensive signage along the concourse, but there was no indication that there might be other kinds of religious—excuse me, spiritual—spaces. It turns out that SFO does, in fact, have a chapel, though it is tucked away... Read more
Cicero said that it is better to be than to seem. Some fifteen centuries later, Machiavelli said it was better to seem than to be. The greater good, thought the former, lay in what you actually were rather than in what others thought you were. Loser talk, thought the latter. Cicero’s tenet was consistent with Aristotle, who said the more valuable of two things is that which men would be satisfied only with possessing outright, rather than that which they... Read more
Dust…flies free for a moment, then returns, leisurely, to the habitual road—that bruised string which leads to and from my heart. -Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces A full year before our wedding, my husband got an offer to complete a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming, which meant that we spent most of our engagement in different time zones. Once a month, I’d fly to Denver and drive two hours north into Laramie, Wyoming, my eyes blind... Read more
Continued from yesterday. McDonald’s employees allegedly assaulted human cyborg Steve Mann in Paris, France on July 17, 2012. When this news item appeared in my Twitter feed, it marked the first time I had seen the word “cyborg” outside the realm of science fiction. Two weeks after this incident, singer-songwriter Derek Webb released his latest album, Ctrl. In writing about the album on Twitter, Webb described it as an exploration of “the tenuous relationship between culture and technology.” When I... Read more
On his 2009 album, Stockholm Syndrome, in a song titled “Freddie Please,” singer-songwriter Derek Webb addresses the head of a certain Kansan family known for hoisting hateful signs aloft and picketing the funerals of soldiers. Over a disposable bed of music that sounds like an electronic retread of the Penguins’ “Earth-Angel,” Webb pleads from the perspective of the risen Christ with Freddie, who is picketing the empty tomb. When I interviewed Webb in Leawood, Kansas on October 20 prior to... Read more
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