“A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release… It is how the mind instructs itself in a more complex seeing.” It is a marvel, though hardly a surprise, that children’s minds are machines for metaphor. We are meaning-making creatures — […]
How the world relished the world before Instagram. To put our familiar lives in perspective and jolt us awake to the wonder of so much we have come to take for granted, let us picture this: It is the 1840s and you, like most of humanity, have never traveled more than a few miles beyond […]
“Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields… Quite often they are the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies to which they bring so much sustenance.” To create anything of beauty, daring, and substance that makes the world see itself afresh — be it a revolutionary […]
Rewilding the landscape of possibility for the poetry of being. “In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929, epochs before we had our ever-expanding twenty-first-century vocabulary of identities, as she celebrated the “androgynous mind” as the mind most “resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.” Given […]
“We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” It is already disorienting enough to accept that our attention only absorbs a fraction of the events and phenomena unfolding within and around us at any given moment. Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we […]
“There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear… People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.” “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is […]
Quiet courage and improbable redemption under the sycamore tree. She has mounted fifty pounds of photography equipment on her bicycle and is pedaling along the shore to the Staten Island ferry, headed for Manhattan. Photography is only a generation old and Alice Austen (March 17, 1866–June 9, 1952) is twenty-nine. She is about to take […]
“Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner abyss.” “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” the great French philosopher Simone Weil wrote shortly before her untimely […]
“You will look at everything. And everything is really quite beautiful. Quite.” “The secret of success,” Jackson Pollock’s father wrote to the teenage artist-to-be in his wonderful letter of life-advice, “is to be fully awake to everything about you.” Few things beckon our attention and awaken us to life more compellingly than color. “Our lives, […]
“Life is loneliness… Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul, in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” Western psychologists have rightly observed that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” Zen Buddhists have rightly observed that “to love without knowing […]