“For this we go out dark nights, searching… for signs of unseen things… Let there be swarms of them, enough for immortality, always a star where we can warm ourselves.” This is the fourth of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder […]
The metaphysical made physical in a symphonic celebration of imagination, collaboration, and the human heart. “Time is a dictator, as we know it,” Nina Simone (February 21, 1933–April 21, 2003) observed in her soulful 1969 meditation on time. “Where does it go? What does it do? Most of all, is it alive?” If time is […]
“The over-all number of minds is just one.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the twenty-one-year-old Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in the first years of the twentieth century, “& all the world is mind.” Those were the dawning days of quantum mechanics, just beginning to illuminate a whole new order of golden threads […]
Wisdom on the elementary particles of the creative life and our shared humanity from Alain de Botton, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Alexander, and other visionaries of our time. If we are not at least a little abashed by the people we used to be, the voyage of life has halted in the windless bay of complacency. […]
A look into “the very heart of nature’s double nature.” “To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her pre-ecological poem about ecology, “is profound Responsibility.” A century later, in one of the most poetic and existentially ravishing children’s* books of all time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his hero’s central preoccupation the responsibility for a […]
“Mingle the starlight with your lives, and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” This is the third of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here are Chapter 1 (the […]
“Every song I’ve ever written has been absolute torture… except for the ten or so songs the gods give you and that come out of nowhere.” “I carry my thoughts about with me for a long time, sometimes a very long time, before I set them down,” Beethoven, having revolutionized music with his stubborn devotion […]
“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.” Not often — a handful of times in a lifetime, if you are lucky — you come upon a work of thought and feeling — a book, a painting, a song — that becomes a fountain to which […]
“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” This is the second of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here is Chapter 1. THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN […]
“Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.” Two hundred and two years after Walt Whitman’s birth, I traveled to the granite emblem of his life and death. Standing sentinel across from the tomb’s entrance are two towering […]