Little Epiphanies

Writing is rather the act of listening carefully. If you listen well enough, the words present themselves like a mist rising from the forest floor. They do not need your assistance; they need your silence. If you don’t scare them off, they come of their own accord like the little creatures in the forest that…

For thirty years now, his days had started with his putting words into notebooks. An uncharitable reviewer had once described him as “a minor poet” and it had stung at the time. But over the years — and with no ensuing rise in his stature to disprove that reviewer, he had come to embrace the…

In the almost silence, worlds step out from their hiding places. Rivers rise up from the sand. Mountains heave themselves out of flatness. There, in the quiet of a new-formed land, we stand together, face-to-face, you and me.

In 1986, I took refuge in a stone monastery at the top of the mountain where the monks wore golden robes and goats roamed the corridors. It was a time without words. The monks believed that a message would be brought to them on the wind so they kept their voices down for fear they’d…

A the door of a tumble-down bar in Buenos Aires, a man watches a woman step out of her car to buy flowers at midnight […]

When I began ballet, I started with standard issue black slippers. Out of affection and frugality, I wore them till they were in tatters. My big toes eventually worked their way through the cloth. Doing routines at the barre one day I was suddenly ashamed of those toes gawking at me. Moreover, I felt pity…