How a Tibetan Turquoise Pendant Keeps Me Close to Home (Catapult)
In giving me her pendant, was my mother not only wishing me well on my journey but handing over our family’s story?
In the Cave (Kyoto Journal)
An essay about the connection between the Tibetan idea of bardo (the interval between death and rebirth, as well as any period when our ordinary reality is suspended), COVID-19, and the Japanese concept of ma: empty space with creative potential. "The epidemic interval we're experiencing is an in-between like ma, like bardo...space charged with possibility."
Porochista Khakpour: “I’ve Become Uninterested in Darkness” (Guernica)
Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity tells a deeply moving—and often startling—story of being brown-skinned in America.
Family Connection in a Teapot (The New York Times)
My Tibetan family has a long history with tea. With many of us still largely sheltering in place because of the Covid-19 epidemic, now is an ideal moment to connect over a cup…
Tibetan Death Horoscopes, Mothers and Daughters, and Legacy-Breaking (Catapult)
Standing next to my mother, I watched the flames leap up around the coffin and thought about my grandmother’s body inside, the death horoscope next to it. Had my grandmother been fated to have an unresolved relationship with my mother because of her troubles with her stepmother? Was I doomed to follow the same pattern with my daughter and carry on a struggle that had endured over three generations?