Sylvia Winters

In my yoga teacher training, I learned the word Vairagya . It can be roughly translated as renunciation, detachment from the pain and pleasure of the material world, or dispassion from worldly things. When I first heard of the idea, it reminded me of existentialism. I heard the word existentialism much earlier in my life; with my temperament and experience, it was natural that I was drawn to it. As I grew older, however, I realized I had misunderstood it all the time. It is easier for a novice thinker, such as myself, to quickly conclude that the universe is indifferent and our life has no meaning. The way I see it now is that existentialism is about forging meaning from within the framework of mundane life, which at first glance may seem meaningless. At its core, existentialism is about determining one’s own meaning of life and committing to it. It is with a similar attitude I approached the idea of Vairagya . Like existentialism , Vairagya is the very opposite of nihilism. It is ...

In An Unquiet Mind , Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison wrote she once had been making several copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renascence . It isn't clear whether Dr. Jamison was copying by hand or machine, but the idea stuck. Two years after reading her book, I finally copied the poem myself. It took just under two hours of handwriting. I have read few poems myself, but whenever I had a chance to memorize a good poem, it invariably had something to do with the theme of rebirth and rediscovering of self. There is something deeply personal about these poems, something that I yearn to experience intimately but fail to achieve in most activities hitherto. It is true that for the first 23 years of my life, death was a fashionable idea—but one out of my power. Life was foreclosed the moment my childhood memory started; it was not one of color, not one of black and white, but one of gray. A numbness, where even the idea of ceasing to exist became too much of an effort. I did not know ...

"The eternality of now — something that never changes, but is always new." (E.S) In this very moment, I am sitting here typing my morning pages. My mind has quieted down, my body is comfortably sitting on my chair. Outside, the sun has risen but is hidden behind the clouds. My room heater is running near my feet, giving me abundant heat to overcome the chilly air of the February morning. Instead of my morning espresso, I am sipping the tea my friend Yeung gave me: made of green tea and orange peels, amber in color, with a smooth taste. All of these, I know, are in the present. And I know that this moment is eternal, not just by memory, but because it is woven into my fabric of being. If I temporarily withdraw my perception of time as linear, I will know that this moment does not pass away since time is congealed into the volume of being, everything is self-contained, and everything happens all at once. There will undoubtedly be other beautiful moments in the volume of being, ...

Because you loved freedom more than the world You are once again a free-flowing soul, moving between lives — From sins of the family, and curses for daughters  — To make forgiveness possible Yesterday we were four millennium children searching for the Big Dipper From the sea of stars in the Southeast Asian night I wanted to be an artist, you said, and I a scientist  And that began the promise of a lifetime  Tonight in the Bay Area I saw the Dipper again  And I knew that nothing is lost — Your dream is safe with me; I am the part of you that survived. As our ages become closer, I finally learned peace in the chaos we shared “Then I saw a new heaven and new earth, for the first heaven and first earth had passed away.” And then I saw New Eden. Good night, my sister Farewell and godspeed (Sylvia Winters Xue to Jing Xue 1991-2025)