“Potentially, every tree is immortal.” Hermann Hesse believed that if we could learn to listen to the trees, we would achieve profound perspective on our human lives by grasping the deepest meaning of aliveness. He used listening in the metaphorical sense. But the great existential gift of trees — to us in the metaphors they […]
On solving problems vs. posing questions. It is a truism that the questions we ask shape the answers we find. It is, also, a truth. Another is that our questions — those wonderments, uncertainties, and quickenings of doubt that roil under the surface of life — are the atomic units of our creativity. Everything we […]
“Here man has invented the heavens but the moon, not to be usurped, shines sickle bright, gathering our souls.” There is an elemental cosmic loneliness in the pit of every human soul. We spend our lives trying to make it bearable and call our efforts love, or art. (Which might, in the end be one […]
“A life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” “When you realize you are mortal,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan wrote while regarding a mountain, “you also realize the tremendousness of the future.” A decade earlier, shortly before a heart attack […]
“You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose.” Self-knowledge might be the most difficult of life’s rewards — the hardest to earn and the hardest to bear. To know yourself is to know that you are […]
A painted landscape of fact and feeling along the flow of existence. “There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today,” Olivia Laing wrote in her stunning meditation on life, loss, and the […]
The gasp beyond fact, contouring the central question of what it is like to be you. “It is not half so important to know as to feel,” Rachel Carson wrote after catalyzing the environmental movement with the rigorous science and passionate poetics of reality, harmonizing fact with feeling as the score to a larger understanding. […]
“We are a music-making species — always have been, always will be — and music’s capacity to explore, express and address what it is to be human remains one of our greatest communal gifts.” “Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern… Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” the poet Ronald Johnson wrote as he contemplated […]
“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.” I am sitting on an airplane, uneasy and grateful amid the sea of masks. I am sitting on […]
“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.” “Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe,” the aging Marcus […]