How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on […]
“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the […]
How to keep your soul from leaving you. “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the finest advice on growing older. “You must do this every […]
“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the […]
Trees, hummingbirds, snails, Stoicism, storytelling, Orwell’s roses, the crucible of consciousness, the end of the universe, and more trees. I used to assemble annual reading lists of favorite books published each year — never an objective claim of bests, always a subjective inner library catalogue of my readings and rivets. But over the years, as […]
A forgotten visionary of rare talent and solemn tenderness. Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931) had barely learned to walk when she began drawing. She never stopped, and her talent never ceased winning over its legion of silent champions. At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State […]
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.” “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it […]
How Victorian astronomy helped decode the secret language of the seas. “Words are events, they do things, change things… they feed energy back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her uncommon ode to the magic of real communication. “They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” For […]
“Your imagination… is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence… a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.” Two years before she fused her childhood impression of a mechanical loom with her devotedly honed gift for mathematics to compose the world’s first computer program in a 65-page footnote, Ada Lovelace postulated in a letter that […]
“Whosoever… is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits… or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy than… to compose himself to the learning of some art or science.” Epochs before modern neuroscience came to locate the crucible of consciousness in the body, centuries before William […]