Author Archives: Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

“Iyengar Yoga master-teacher, Kofi Busia, writes: ‘Health is not, and cannot be, an individual affair. It is a community—indeed, a cosmic—affair. Individuation is the root cause of all suffering. A community, even a yoga community, sickens when its individual members do not extend the bonds of unity to one another through the exercise awareness and […]

“The year of work was intense and solitary. Helen, on her coast, set me tasks; I, on the other coast, took them on. One involved visualizing the mindful subtraction—element by element—of parts of my physical body, until . . . what, finally, was left? It would be inappropriate to document this meditation, in full, here, […]

“What I do remember, and perhaps few others are alive to share these memories now, is that, before the tourists, came the painters. Greece, and the Cyclades in particular, with their ethereal, stunning light, called artists forth from all over the world. Luis and Lilly were not alone, painting in cold island studios in 1960. […]

“He was old when last I saw him. He’d quit fighting the mirror. His hair was clipped short, unlike the Cinnabon concoction of the 70s. No more that hopeful objet trouvé swirling over the noble dome. No more the lie. He was heavy, like an old boxer; like Hemingway, top-heavy. And he wore that red, […]

“Affliction is a well-visited destination, but one on no one’s published itinerary. Our visas are universally stamped (in invisible ink) at birth (and, often, before birth) in our mutable flesh. But, until we arrive at the border and gaze over the wall, we have no true notion of what to expect. Some of us are […]

“On the first of January, though, these dreams abruptly ceased after my husband and I drove north, out of Florida, through Georgia, and on up into the Piedmont of South Carolina. Drove home, in fact, though I was born elsewhere, and have lived only nine of my 66 years in the birthplace of my mother […]

“I hasten to declare that I have been married to my present spouse only since 2002, though I knew I loved him the moment I saw him on 3 October 1999 and, in a moment, I shall get to that story, which he and I tell quite differently. Dean’s version involves an hour-long disquisition on […]

“I know I made some small talk then, but the rest is a blur: the pot-bellied stove and the shelves (and shelves and shelves) of pickles and preserves, put up by Mama Boleman in Mason Jars, were gone. And the rockers. The big house had become very much someone else’s home place.”—Elizabeth Boleman-Herring By Way […]

“Reader, pause here. What followed was, and remains, an utterly unique experience in my life. This was no shop girl waving strips of scented blotting paper, hawking mass-produced aromas in a mall. This was the man who had created new perfumes, from scratch, and who had come to Greece because the country’s botanic wealth might […]

“Mademoiselle—I never knew her last name—was a Romanian refugee, a member of the royal family and, we were told, a princess. There were many royals in Romania until the last king, Michael, was deposed in 1947, and the rest of the Romanian Hohenzollern-Sigmaringens scattered throughout Europe and into exile. Marie had become, in one fell […]