"Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies... differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear... What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." | Continue reading
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of intelligence is a plast … | Continue reading
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, politica … | Continue reading
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an ea … | Continue reading
"If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world." | 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
"The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible." | Continue reading
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come... We live everything as it comes, without warning." | Continue reading
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” We … | Continue reading
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that h … | Continue reading
"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back." | Continue reading
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me like the stone thron … | Continue reading
"Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged." | Continue reading
In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and us, half a lifetime before he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the polymathic French phi … | Continue reading
"We hear and apprehend only what we already half know." | Continue reading
"There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others." | 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
"It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all." | Continue reading
"I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it." | Continue reading
Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A sapling has growth through the glassless windshield. Bright orange fungi have colonized the driver’s … | Continue reading
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which … | Continue reading
"Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there." | Continue reading
"Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought." | Continue reading
"If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration." | Continue reading
I spent the summer using the fantastic binomial technique developed by Gianni Rodari — the beloved Italian writer whose stories lit up my Bulgarian childhood — as a creative prompt for poetry, part of the larger binomial two people co-create when their worlds touch each other in … | Continue reading
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of "the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great." | Continue reading
In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she would later recall, was a ten-year … | Continue reading
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature … | Continue reading
I once asked ChatGPT to write a poem about a total solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a dozen couplets of cliches that touched nothing, changed nothing in me. The AI had the whole of the English language at its disposal — a lexicon surely manyfold the poet’s … | Continue reading
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in suc … | Continue reading
"The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study... I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight." | Continue reading
"It is the intentions, the capacities for choice rather than the total configuration of traits which defines the person." | Continue reading
Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what language can hold. And … | Continue reading
"All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured." | Continue reading
"Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique." | Continue reading
"One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy." | Continue reading
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” When the first European colonists made landfall on New Zealand’s … | Continue reading
"If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me." | Continue reading
The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last cup at your favorite coffee shop before it vanished overnight, the last living note of yo … | Continue reading
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death." | Continue reading
"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them." | Continue reading
"You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive." | Continue reading
The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. — “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of … | Continue reading
"The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart." | Continue reading
This is an excerpt from Traversal. Where does love go when it goes? It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, bellowing in the bosom of every brokenhearted lover, reverberating through the body of every civilization’s love songs and sonnets, radia … | Continue reading
"We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness." | Continue reading
"These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands." | Continue reading
"Zen practice ... requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning." | Continue reading