“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.” This essay is adapted from Figuring. In June of 1952, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service received a letter of resignation from its […]
“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies […]
A resaning antidote to one of the most dangerous and damaging romantic myths in our culture. All love is asymmetry. Since love is not a state but a skill to be mastered, not a noun but a verb, all loving is the skillful harmonizing of asymmetries across the scales of personhood and preference between those […]
“Within every color lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture… The right words can come only out of the perfect space of a place you love.” “The deep blue water of the open sea far from land is the color of emptiness and barrenness; the green water of the coastal areas, […]
“Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern.” “A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music,” Mark Strand wrote in his splendid poem “The Everyday Enchantment of Music,” touching on the materiality of that enchantment: Music is matter dancing in the mind. Music has a profound spiritual […]
“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief.” Grief is the shadow love casts in the light of loss. The grander the love, the vaster the shadow. So much of who we are — who we discover ourselves to be — takes shape in that umbral space as we fumble for some edge to hold […]
Encounters with the beautiful and the sublime in the science of “the single most dangerous object known to humanity.” On July 13, 1862, while a young experiment in democracy was being ripped asunder by its first Civil War, The Springfield Republican reported a strange and wondrous celestial sighting in the undivided sky, as bright as […]
“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.” “We call it ‘Nature’; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be ‘Nature’ too,” Denise Levertov wrote in her revelation of a poem “Sojourns in the Parallel World” a generation after history’s most poetic […]
“Every plant one tends he falls in love with… Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.” “I had a pleasant time with my mind, for it was happy,” Louisa May Alcott wrote in her diary just after […]
How a visionary turned the art of noticing into a leap of science. “I have marveled at the green urchins on a Maine shore, clinging to the exposed rock at low water of spring tides, where the beautiful coralline algae spread a rose-colored crust beneath the shining green of their bodies,” Rachel Carson wrote as […]