“For most of their history… gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill.” “Oh that beloved witch-hazel,” Emily Dickinson wrote to her cousins in 1876 as she tended to her famous garden, […]
“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.” Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our […]
Cinematic songs of praise for the visible invisibilities and the silent symphonies that make life worth living. “Now I will do nothing but listen,” the young Walt Whitman resolved as he pressed his ear against the eternal song of being a century before Aldous Huxley found in the transcendent power of music a portal into […]
“As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give… Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.” “Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of a symphony three centuries ago, when the existence of other galaxies was unimaginable and hummingbirds were considered magic, when the fact of […]
Notes from the odyssey of ongoingness, notes for the symphony of aliveness. We are born without choosing to, to parents we haven’t chosen, into bodies and borders we haven’t chosen, to exist in a region of spacetime we haven’t chosen for a duration we don’t choose. As physicists know, we don’t choose the particular atoms […]
A lyric reminder that “the word for world is forest” and the feeling of forest is love. I have been thinking a great deal about growth — what it means, what it asks of us, how it feels when unforced but organic. I have been thinking about growth and decay, the interplay between the two, […]
“We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable…” While it is true, as generations of psychologists have found, that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love” — a process known as limbic revision — […]
“All things seem possible in nature; yet this seeming is always guarded by the eager quest of what IS true. Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth and to express it.” “Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end,” Dylan Thomas […]
“Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back.” “Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and soul, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” In those primal sanities, we […]
“Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, we cease being captive to the myth of normalcy — the cultural […]