“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 […]
A couple months after his big breakup, Shawn Mendes is clearing his head — and getting in another woman’s face! The Stitches singer has been hanging in Hawaii with his boys for the past week or so; he’s been sharing some of his relaxing exploits, like yoga and swimming, on his Instagram feed. View this post on […]
How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on […]
“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.” We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the […]
How to keep your soul from leaving you. “The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the finest advice on growing older. “You must do this every […]
Oh boy did Tom Holland get the wrong idea about Mark Wahlberg for an afternoon! While plugging their upcoming film Uncharted, the stars spoke about their first time meeting one another, which went great — until a generous gift turned into an incredibly awkward car ride! During the Access Hollywood interview, Tom described being nervous to meet the Lone Survivor […]
“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the […]
Trees, hummingbirds, snails, Stoicism, storytelling, Orwell’s roses, the crucible of consciousness, the end of the universe, and more trees. I used to assemble annual reading lists of favorite books published each year — never an objective claim of bests, always a subjective inner library catalogue of my readings and rivets. But over the years, as […]
A forgotten visionary of rare talent and solemn tenderness. Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900–1931) had barely learned to walk when she began drawing. She never stopped, and her talent never ceased winning over its legion of silent champions. At fourteen, unthoughtful of achievement and ambition, friends persuaded her to send her drawings to the Kansas State […]
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.” “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it […]