By Mary Patrice Erdmans
Ulrich, a robust 52-year-old pilgrim dressed in a red flannel shirt, told me, “I want to walk through the world without leaving footprints. It’s hard work to be silent.”
Sitting alone inside the walls of the convent of Santa Clara in Carrion de los Condes, Spain, I stretch out my legs under the […]

By Ginny Horton
I have been Maria Von Trapp on many a mountainside. Isak Denisen eating on fine china
in Kenya by day. Ernest Hemingway smoking cigars and drinking warm scotch around the campfire by night. I have yet to be diagnosed as schizophrenic but have undergone distinct personality changes while traveling. It begins with the accent, […]

By Elizabeth Galewski
My alarm went off and I shot out of the hard bed in my dingy Delhi hotel room, every cell in my body charged and eager. I was going to fly to London that day. I was going to pack up my bags, go to the airport, and fly to London. I was […]

by Joel Carillet
I was thinking about paradise, a word so often flippantly tossed around in churches and mosques, at Club Med resorts and on Norwegian cruise liners. The word could be powerful, but we’ve made it soft.
It was 1:00 a.m., an hour before closing. A bottle of Heineken hung from my left hand […]

by Pamela Cordell Avis
A modern tale of metamorphosis.
I was at one of life’s crossroads, you know, the kind that either can or cannot divert you to a journey down an untraveled road.
To move from L.A. to a tiny farming village in France was not an option, it was not even an idea. It often happens, […]

by Jennifer Baljko
“Hi. I’m Jennifer - eternal student and citizen of the world.” This is how I’ve started to introduce myself. Maybe it’s presumptuous. And, it sounds silly to say. But, since I am at loss to describe what it is that I do these days, I think this sums it up.
Before - that is, […]

by Elizabeth Striebel
What startled me most was his candor. He had a soft way about him, present, but not crowding. Actually, he pulled you towards him, as if to hear him better, or to see him more clearly. But he was honest. Of course, how could I know if he was […]

by Mei-Ling McNamara
“What motivated such people to do their deplorable work? Anger? Certainly. But also the longing for order, a desire to turn the human world into an inorganic one, where everything would function perfectly and work on schedule. The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is […]