“This fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It’s not even the outline of a synopsis of notes toward a rough draft yet.” Perhaps the gravest violence we can do to ourselves is to live out our lives […]
“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.” Conversing with a symphonic-minded physicist and a science-spirited musician on a small boat off the coast of a small island, I express my skepticism that the swell of digital records […]
Tragedy and transcendence in the search for the spiritual in nature. “Do you need a prod? Do you need a little darkness to get you going?” wrote Mary Oliver in one of the masterpiece from her suite of poems celebrating the urgency of aliveness, Blue Horses. In the bleak winter of 1916, in the thickest […]
“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. […]