Julia Buendia Allone was proud of her name, even though it made people uncomfortable. People said there was no more difficult name in the world. How do you pronounce it? I don’t mind, said Julia, it’s up to you. But people still wanted to know. They shied away from calling her “Alone” although that was the obvious pronunciation to many. Perhaps they felt that labelling her with such a name represented a small act of cruelty. A story by John Simmons, Illustrated by Anita Klein.

During the first meditation of my silent retreat at the Insight Meditation Society, I realized I didn’t really want to be away. For months I had longed to be cloistered in silence in the wilds of Massachusetts in the depths of February. Yet in the candlelit meditation hall, I understand that I never really wanted to be elsewhere, just here, fully here, inside my own life. My deepest longing was not to go out but to sink down under the layers of conditioning, to touch the unconditioned. I remembered suddenly and with great force that the kingdom of heaven is within. Tracy Cochran

What do I remember about that summer? The ending of a marriage, the returning raw to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, passing through the sweltering city heat receiving one day, one hour, one moment as it came, trying to remain sober. Working it through, acknowledging the pull and the lure of the highs and lows, but going with neither (to those attractions I heard myself say by the river—“been there, done that”). I kept on walking, not denying the pain, simply letting it pass through the body, and then one morning in the midst of it all, the fox came. Ted McNamara