We are denizens of an enormous pebble drifting through the cosmic ocean of pure spacetime — a planet made a world largely by its rockiness. Rock gave us mountains and beaches, bridges and kitchen countertops, gave us the first Promethean fire that sparked civilization. A rock is … | Continue reading
“It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.” | Continue reading
"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind's true mortal test, its fundamental test... consists of its attitude toward those who are at its mercy: animals." | Continue reading
“There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things.” | Continue reading
“Without freedom, what we call a person does not exist.” | Continue reading
It is one of the hardest things in life — discerning where we end and the rest of the world begins, negotiating the permeable boundary between self and other, all the while longing for its dissolution, longing to be set free from the prison of ourselves. That is why we cherish na … | Continue reading
“Into the space ship, Granny.” | Continue reading
“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known essays. In his exquisite memoir of the search for inner light, the blind resistance hero Jacque … | Continue reading
“Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there.” | Continue reading
“Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.” | Continue reading
“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” | Continue reading
“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.” | Continue reading
“It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.” | Continue reading
“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.” | Continue reading
Alongside humans, leafcutter ants form some of nature’s vastest, most sophisticated societies — a single mature colony can contain as many ants as there are people on Earth, living with a great deal more social harmony and consonance of purpose than we do. They are also one of ou … | Continue reading
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” | Continue reading
On an anonymous desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage girl with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic mind is bent over an astronomy book, preparing to revolutionize our understanding of the planet. The year is 1836. No university anywhere in the w … | Continue reading
"Human lives... are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence... into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life." | Continue reading
After breaking out of timidity with “Spell Against Indifference,” an offering of another poem — this one inspired by a lovely piece of science news that touched me with its sonorous existential echoes. THE HALF-LIFE OF HOPE by Maria Popova Walking beneath the concrete canopy … | Continue reading
“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.” | Continue reading
In May 1941, next to news of the Nazi savagely bombing London, The Los Angeles Times published a memorial profile of “California’s Mother of Gardens” — a hopeful antidote to the undoing of the human world, celebrating the woman who covered Southern California with the loveliest t … | Continue reading
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” | Continue reading
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to r … | Continue reading
“We have created a great, almost overwhelming incubus of falsity and ugliness on top of us, so that we are almost crushed to death. Now let us move it.” | Continue reading
"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge." | Continue reading
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” | Continue reading
“There is no greatness without a little stubbornness… Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity.” | Continue reading
I was a latecomer to poetry — an art form I did not understand and, as we tend to do with what we do not understand, discounted. But under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being where the truest truths dwe … | Continue reading
“It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived… an indefinable translucent blue quite unlike anything I have ever seen in the upper world.” | Continue reading
The most discomposing thing about people capable of monstrous acts is that they too enjoy art, they too read to their children, they too can be moved to tears by music. The dissident poet Joseph Brodsky captured this as he contemplated the greatest antidote to evil, observing tha … | Continue reading
“There is no insurmountable solitude,” Pablo Neruda asserted in his stirring Nobel Prize acceptance speech. “All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the en … | Continue reading
“A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.” | Continue reading
Right this minute, people are making plans, making promises and poems, while at the center of our galaxy a black hole with the mass of four billion suns screams its open-mouth kiss of oblivion. Someday it will swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produc … | Continue reading
“We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment.” | Continue reading
“…or there will be genocide, atomic bombs, and we’ll all perish and take the planet with us.” | Continue reading
This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he c … | Continue reading
“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.” | Continue reading
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson lamented in a love letter. In his splendid short poem about the secret of happiness, Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we … | Continue reading
How to tell a plaything from a necessity. | Continue reading
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars." | Continue reading
“If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that… That opens things up.” | Continue reading
“The day of a single universal language will dawn!… This language will be of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colors, one thought mounting another.”… | Continue reading
“Liberty is a better husband than love.” | Continue reading
Bridging Blake and Darwin with a single-hair brush. | Continue reading
"You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power... Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace." | Continue reading
Traversing the landscape of life on the wings of trust. | Continue reading
How to embrace our inheritance as “a creature of organic substance and electricity that can be eaten, injured and dissipated back into the enigmatic physics of the universe.” | Continue reading
"If we are to be true and worthy heretics, we need not only new heads, but new hearts, and, most of all, that new emotional imagination... begotten of enlarged sympathies and a more sensitive habit of feeling." | Continue reading