FOCUS | From the Editor

Superstorms. Deadly sweatshop fires. The Fukushima nuclear disaster. Since the turn of the millennium we have seen how elevating efficiency and growth over service and sustainability, how declaring a few aspects of force to be the whole of power, unbalances and destroys. Treating the world like a bottom-line business—seeking to gain the most while giving the least—can no longer be defended as empowering. But then what is the future?

Seeing is the beginning of healing. In this Fall 2013 issue of Parabola, new poetry by Mary Oliver and essays about being with animals and with our own bodies reveal that seeing can bring a new kind of power. “I’m not the river/that powerful presence,” writes Oliver. Seeing what we are not reveals what we may yet become.

“There was a time when every grove and stream was sacred, meaning and wisdom found in the cycles of the moon and the germination of the plants,” writes Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in this issue. Heart-stopping images of icebergs by photographer Camille Seaman remind us that although we have forgotten this way of receiving the world, we can remember. Elsewhere in these pages, shaman Michael Harner describes a cave power quest undertaken in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in recent times. Daring to descend into the depths of the earth and himself, he returns with new healing power and new appreciation for the mystery of creation.

New powers may be revealed in beings and situations we judge to be powerless. Describing what it is like to tame a wild stallion, Linda Kohanov observes the two-way relationship between the seer and what is seen, by referring to the Buddha’s way with horses: “What if the stallion that Siddhartha so skillfully trained had also been training him, psychologically as well as physically carrying his master away from the heavily defended, insulated palace of a hierarchical father?”

May this new issue of Parabola carry you.

—Tracy Cochran