A technicolor serenade to the variousness of this world. | Continue reading
“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.” | Continue reading
“A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work.” | Continue reading
"I think if I could subsist on you... I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent... I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around." | Continue reading
On that singular moment at the end of life when all creative energy is concentrated and consecrated. | Continue reading
“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.” | Continue reading
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place." | Continue reading
“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.” | Continue reading
"We are ourselves creating our own successors... We are daily giving them... that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race." | Continue reading
“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” | Continue reading
A fluid serenade to this blue world, with a side of Rebecca Solnit. | Continue reading
"People ask: 'Would you or would you not like to be young again?' Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible... You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no 'you' except your life — lived." | Continue reading
“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.” | Continue reading
“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.” | Continue reading
“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” | Continue reading
“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.” | Continue reading
Composer, writer, artist, and Zen Buddhist John Cage (September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992) pioneered the aesthetics of silence, but he was animated by a clamorous inner life. When he was twenty-two, while dating another young man, Cage met artist Xenia Kashevaroff - the Alaskan-bor … | Continue reading
This might be the most transcendent capacity of consciousness, and the most terrifying: that in the world of the mind, we can construct models of the real world built upon theories of exquisite internal consistency; that those theories can have zero external validity when tested … | Continue reading
“…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” | Continue reading
How humanity turned another species into its first specie. | Continue reading
For all the hopeful creatures. | Continue reading
“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.&… | Continue reading
A humming serenade to the “awareness of awareness” from which our creative restlessness springs. | Continue reading
"One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us." | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
“Do unshed tears wait in little lakes?” | Continue reading
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” | Continue reading
On the value of remaining resolutely what you are. | Continue reading
"The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels." | Continue reading
How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of children on a summer afternoon. | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
"We are denizens of an age in which our actions, in the realm of ideology as in the realm of technology, increasingly have global effects. When it comes to the compass of our concern and compassion, humanity as a whole is not too broad a horizon." | Continue reading
“The world is a Phoenix. It perishes in flames and even as it dies it is born again.” | Continue reading
“The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before.” | Continue reading
“Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.” | Continue reading
“Design is the enzyme that helps people face and metabolize change.” | Continue reading
“…a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time.” | Continue reading
“A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.” | Continue reading
"It is only through the gates of suffering, either mental or physical that we can pass into that tender sympathy with the griefs of all of mankind which it ought to be the ideal of every soul to attain." | Continue reading
“When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.” | Continue reading
“There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.” | Continue reading
“Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.” | Continue reading
“Everything that is possible is real.” | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it … | Continue reading
“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.” | Continue reading
A pocket guide to Neapolitan nonverbal communication. | Continue reading
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” | Continue reading