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
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life … | Continue reading
The summer I turned sixteen, I took a bus across Bulgaria — I suppose you could call it running away, though my parents were aware and unconcerned — to go sit on the edge of the Black Sea and watch the blue horizon, to touch its infinite loneliness and infinite happiness. I have … | Continue reading
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay." | Continue reading
"To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time." | Continue reading
“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with … | Continue reading
How to "include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall whole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border." | Continue reading
"Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you." | Continue reading
Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling … | Continue reading
An existential lesson gleaned from a brush with death and foolishness. | Continue reading
"Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp... the ultimate mystery of Life itself." | Continue reading
We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the living — life keeps surprising us, keeps reminding us that all too often the wildest be … | Continue reading
At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing my discoveries — pass … | Continue reading
"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance... To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple." | Continue reading
Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense library — is a single yellow leaf, its curved fan almost glowing against a faded illustration of the Whit … | Continue reading
"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked." | Continue reading
Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascin … | Continue reading
"Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." | Continue reading
"Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds." | Continue reading
"Rage, rage against the dying of the light." | Continue reading
Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pilgrimage toward mind. Perhaps our saline cells remember it: how we, pilgrims of the … | Continue reading
"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world." | Continue reading
"Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve… to live in the world with the absence of someone… ingrained in your understanding of the world… For the brain, [they are] simultaneously gone and also everlasting, and you are walking through two worlds at the … | Continue reading
"Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them." | Continue reading
Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves … | Continue reading
The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth. | Continue reading
“Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.” | Continue reading
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my … | Continue reading
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and every eyelash to get through the daily tasks punctuating the unbidden wonder of ou … | Continue reading
"Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is... on each person... creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being." | Continue reading
We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffering, and by what we make of our suffering, that our personhood ripens in us, that we come to r … | Continue reading
"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning." | Continue reading
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state." | Continue reading
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and … | Continue reading
They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark humus to which the body will one day return, they become a spell against despair and a consecration of al … | Continue reading
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible. | Continue reading
"This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole." | Continue reading