Poetic enchantments in pen, ink, and imagination. In the final stretch of World War I, having earned a degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in an era when under 4% of women graduated college, Dorothy Pulis Lathrop (April 16, 1891–December 30, 1980) was commissioned to illustrate a book of experimental imagist poems by […]
Soulful sylvan consolation partway between David Byrne, Bill T. Jones, and the Buddha. When I am sad, I like to imagine myself becoming a tree. Branches that bend without breaking, fractal with possibility, reaching resolutely toward the light. Roots touching the web of belonging beneath the surface of the world, that majestic mycelial network succoring […]
“Wintering… is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can. Wintering is a moment of intuition, our true needs felt keenly as a knife.” Rilke reverenced winter as the season for tending to the inner garden of the soul: “Suddenly to be […]
How a refugee and a lesbian lifted humanity from the age of superstition to the age of reason and pioneered the subversive art of telling our own stories by our own truth. “To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus told a gathering of young people at the peak of the Cold War, shortly […]
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.” “I function only by falling in love: with French and France; […]
“We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But… it shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequalities, and it offers other ways of living.” The composite creation of a doctor, a philosopher, a poet, and a […]
An inspired signal from that sacred place where the spirit of wakeful action meets the bone of ancient wisdom. “Every story is a story of water,” Native American poet Natalie Diaz wrote in her stunning ode to her heritage, the language of the Earth, and the erasures of history. We ourselves are a story of […]
“In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.” I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold. I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not linear but fractal. Love especially. In a testament to Aldous […]
“Try to accept this fat red hurt is your starting point.” “Love your heart. For this is the prize,” Toni Morrison wrote in an exquisite passage from Beloved as she considered the body as an instrument of sanity, joy, and self-respect a century after William James asserted in his groundbreaking work on how our bodies […]
“If we ourselves do not govern our destiny, firmly and courageous, no one is going to do it for us.” A century after the trailblazing conservationist John Muir observed that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” and half a century before Maya […]