“Intelligence asserts itself above all not in art, nor in science, but in intuition of life.” In her spare, stunning poem “Optimism,” Jane Hirshfield reverences the “blind intelligence” by which a tree relentlessly orients toward the light to survive — a kind of unreasoning, life-hungry intuition distinctly different from the way we humans define and […]
“if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love” Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what […]
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem — […]
How the gaps in gravity contour the next frontiers in the quest to understand the fundaments of what we are. Between the time Hypatia of Alexandria first pointed her pre-telescopic eye to the cosmos millennia before the notion of galaxies and the time Vera Rubin stood at the foot of the world’s most powerful telescope […]
“The more stressful the environment, the more likely you are to see plants working together to ensure mutual survival.” In 1977, a young forestry student tasked with marking an ironwood tree for “release cutting” — the logging or poisoning of particular trees on the dogmatic premise that their demise would release more commercially valuable nearby […]
“There seems little doubt that the application of the principles of ecology to human affairs, whether personal, national or world-wide, would go far in solving the problems that beset us.” “There is one book that I would rather have produced than all my novels,” Willa Cather rued in her most candid interview about creativity. That […]
“Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.” “Her voice is deep, rich, and full of color; she speaks with her whole body, like a singer… Whatever she does is done with every fibre,” a […]
Facing the logical fallacies that fuel painful emotional patterns and what it takes to break them with dignity, mindfulness, and emotional maturity. “Across the morning sky, all the birds are leaving,” Nina Simone sang in 1969. “How can they know that it’s time to go?” A decade earlier, a young Swiss psychologist traversed the Atlantc […]
“Forgiving… is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.” “To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt,” poet […]
“Don’t start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.” “A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of […]