Linda Geraghty

I don't remember the world and its human inhabitants ever being this divided before. Where most of the population is either shouting, because they KNOW they are right, and everyone else needs to go live on an Island somewhere away from here, or they are tuning out completely because it's all too much noise that they cannot make sense of. This week as I began reading Gwendolyn Brooks and Grace Paley, I felt a surge of relief in what and how they saw the world. Both women wrote about the messy,...

The first paragraph if John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”, shows suburban couples nonchalantly talking about how they all “drank too much” last night, and although, this is a potential problem due to the lack of comfortability around the physical effects of the hangovers, a bigger problem would be to not have a hangover, as that would be going against the grain.   There exists an unspoken rule that they are all in this together, this suburban world in the 1960’s. This group of hungover suburbanites...

People suffer. That is part of the human experience. According to Buddha, though, suffering is optional, and we have control over how we...