“As I wander into the predawn dark of an autumn wood, I feel the presence of things beyond flesh, bone, and blood. My being expands to fit the limitlessness of the wild world.” “Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is […]
“…as long as our kindness is still incomparable, peerless even in its imperfection…” “They should have sent a poet,” gasps Jodie Foster’s character in the film based on Carl Sagan’s novel Contact as another galaxy emerges before her eyes outside the spaceship window, redeeming with the wonder of possibility her lifelong dream of finding intelligent […]
A tender invitation to look more closely and love ourselves, each other, and the world more deeply. Walt Whitman, who considered trees the profoundest teachers in how to best be human, remembered the woman he loved and respected above all others as that rare person who was “entirely herself; as simple as nature; true, honest; […]
A spare guide to making joyous peace with “the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love).” Who could fault us, really? Who could fault us — exquisite miracles of evolution with a wilderness of consciousness compacted into a modest mammalian skull with a limited […]
The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth. The vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off amid the rubble, bruised and indignant, we further pain ourselves with the exertion of staggering emotional energy on outrage […]
The world’s first pictorial glimpse of the strange and wondrous creatures that give our planet its scent and color. A century after the self-taught German naturalist and artist Maria Merian laid the foundation of entomology with her art, and a century before the Australian teenage sisters Harriet and Helena Scott fomented one of the greatest […]
How to see the universe in a small orange orb. My poet friend Marie Howe gives the students in her ecopoetry class a lovely assignment: At the outset of the semester, each young poet is asked to name the animal they find most repulsive, then to learn everything they can about it — scientifically, historically, […]
“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.” “In forty years of medical practice,” the great neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients…: music and gardens.” Virginia Woolf, savaged by depression […]
“Patient thought, patient labor, and firmness of purpose are almost omnipotent.” To be human is to live suspended between the scale of snails and the scale of stars, confined by our creaturely limitations but not doomed by them — we have, after all, transcended them to compose the Benedictus and eradicate smallpox and land a […]
“Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.” “Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness,” Leo Tolstoy — a man of colossal compassion and colossal blind spots — wrote while […]