“Also: This is it.” “Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul,” Walt Whitman wrote as the Golden Age of Exploration was setting, psychology was beginning to dawn, and the parallel conquests of nature and of human nature were about to converge into their present chaos […]
From the Stoics to the snails, by way of music, matter, and the mind. It is an annual ritual to glance over time’s shoulder each year and reflect on what has made it most livable and worthy of living through my writing — always the clearest mirror of what irradiated and perturbed my heart and […]
“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” This essay is adapted from the sixth chapter of Figuring. “I am determined on distinction,” Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850) writes to her former teacher. She is fifteen. The year is 1825 […]
“A great deal of our onslaught on Mother Nature is not really lack of intelligence but a lack of compassion… True wisdom requires both thinking with our head and understanding with our heart.” Two and a half millennia ago, while devising the world’s first algorithm and using it to revolutionize music — that hallmark of […]
“Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.” “A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his revolutionary theory of how our bodies affect our feelings just before the birth of neuroscience — a science still young, which has already revolutionized our understanding of the […]
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.” A decade ago, when I first began practicing with […]
From the river to the Milky Way, by way of trees, geese, and unsung heroes. Great children’s books are works of existential philosophy in disguise — gifts of timeless consolation for the eternal child living in each of us, on the pages of which some of the most visionary minds of every era are formed. […]
An uncommonly original and tenderhearted celebration of how an artist becomes an artist. Childhood is one great brush-stroke of loneliness, thick and pastel-colored, its edges blurring out into the whole landscape of life. In this blur of being by ourselves, we learn to be ourselves. One measure of maturity might be how well we grow […]
“Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.” “The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake,” the artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan wrote as she considered creativity and the nocturnal imagination. It […]
“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” Almost everything I write, I “write” in the notebook of the mind, with the foot in motion — what happens at the keyboard upon returning from the long daily […]