“A history of exercise is not really — or certainly not only — a history of the body. It is, equally, perhaps even primarily, a history of the mind.” “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” wondered Whitman two years before he wrote a manual on “manly health and training” […]
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. Something happens when you are in a garden, when you garden — something beyond the tactile reminder that, in the history of life on Earth, without flowers, there would be no us. Kneeling between the scale of seeds and […]
A two-wheel romp through the topography of progress from Victorian times to rural Spain to twentieth-century America. “You are at all times independent. This absolute freedom of the cyclist can be known only to the initiated,” Maria Ward wrote in her blazing 1896 manifesto Bicycling for Ladies, celebrating the bicycle as an instrument of emancipation, […]
Because grief, too, is a thing with feathers. “Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted,” Elizabeth Gilbert wrote in her loss-lensed reflection on life. “In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.” Indeed, it is often said that grief is the price we pay for love, that […]
“Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time… not just the ‘now’… or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal.” “Time is being and being time, it is all one thing, the shining, the seeing, the dark abounding,” Ursula K. […]
A song of praise for that place in us housing “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness,” Loren Eiseley wrote in his exquisite meditation on our search for meaning. “We forget that each one of us […]
“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause… We trace the round again; and are… Ifs eternally.” “The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth,” the poet Robert Penn Warren […]
A vibrant celebration of flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.” “To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her prescient ode to the interconnectedness of nature, “is profound responsibility.” A passionate lifelong gardener, the poet had fallen under the spell of wildflowers while composing her […]
“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe.” This is the final installment in the nine-part animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through […]
“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” While the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell was contemplating social change and the life of the mind and her contemporary Walt Whitman was instructing America’s young on what it takes to be an agent of change, on the other side of the […]