“The distance between here and there is the answer to the wrong question.” “What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious,” Lisel Mueller wrote in her stunning poem about what gives meaning to our mortal lives as she neared, but never quite reached, the triumph of having lived a century — […]
A subtle sylvan celebration of how our hurts and our healings shape the singular beauty of our character. Few things salve sanity better than the awareness that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, and few places foster this awareness more readily than the forest — this cathedral of infinite possibility, pillared by trees […]
“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” To face the question of what makes us who we are with courage, lucidity, and fulness of feeling is to face, with all the restlessness and helplessness this stirs in […]
“Doing and making are acts of hope, and as that hope grows we stop feeling overwhelmed by the troubles of the world. We remember that we — as individuals and groups — can do something about those troubles.” When Matthew Burgess was an eleven-year-old already feeling other in the suburban Southern California of his childhood […]
“For most of their history… gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill.” “Oh that beloved witch-hazel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, […]
“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.” Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our […]
Cinematic songs of praise for the visible invisibilities and the silent symphonies that make life worth living. “Now I will do nothing but listen,” the young Walt Whitman resolved as he pressed his ear against the eternal song of being a century before Aldous Huxley found in the transcendent power of music a portal into […]
“As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give… Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.” “Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of a symphony three centuries ago, when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were considered magic, when the fact of […]
Notes from the odyssey of ongoingness, notes for the symphony of aliveness. We are born without choosing to, to parents we haven’t chosen, into bodies and borders we haven’t chosen, to exist in a region of spacetime we haven’t chosen for a duration we don’t choose. As physicists know, we don’t choose the particular atoms […]
A lyric reminder that “the word for world is forest” and the feeling of forest is love. I have been thinking a great deal about growth — what it means, what it asks of us, how it feels when unforced but organic. I have been thinking about growth and decay, the interplay between the two, […]