Author Archives: Tracy Cochran

Last week, while visiting my father and sister in Florida, I took what I’m quite sure will be my last roller coaster ride, “Expedition Everest,” the latest spectacularly elaborate attraction at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane wrote an essay about the rich and strange art and mindset of Walt Disney,Continue reading “The Happiest Place on Earth”

Christians call it the “recollected heart.” In Sanskrit it is called “smirti,” or “that which is remembered.”  “Sati,” the word for mindfulness in Pali, the ancient Sanskrit dialect of the earliest Buddhist texts, means to remember.  The great Zen sage Dogen spoke of taking a half step back inside ourselves, creating the space to allowContinue reading “stepping back”

Traveling by car is like watching life on a screen, wrote Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his classic account of a motorcycle journey with his 11-year-old son that is really an inquiry into values.“You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On aContinue reading “Open and closed (post redux)”

“I should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth,” said my 11-year-old daughter Alexandra as we rode the train down to Manhattan one February day in 2002. “I don’t belong in this time.” Alexandra had been lamenting like this for weeks, ever since she had seen The Fellowship of the Ring, the firstContinue reading “who knew?”