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
“…greener than grass I am and dead — or almost I seem to me.” | Continue reading
“I shall not take what is not given. I shall not harm what does not harm me. The only footprints I shall leave are those that will wash away.” | Continue reading
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.” | Continue reading
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” | 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
A love-poem to those folds in spacetime that take us back to “when Sappho was a living girl.” | Continue reading
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” | Continue reading
“We think we have looked at a thing sharply until we are asked for its specific features.” | Continue reading
In praise of the exquisite instrument that channels “the huge chaos of sensations — sensations of temperature, water, force, light.” | Continue reading
“Some day… there will come a reckoning. The country will discover… that no nation can exist or have any solidity which ignores the land. But it will cost the country dear.” | Continue reading
1879 | Continue reading
“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.” | Continue reading
“Seashells were money before coin, jewelry before gems, art before canvas… To stare into the spiral top of a whelk or cone shell is to see the swirl of the Milky Way.” | Continue reading
“If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration.” | Continue reading
Silk, vapor, and the substance of life. | Continue reading
A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.” | Continue reading
“Our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part.” | Continue reading