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The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison
“We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.” The great paradox of personhood is that the sum is simpler than its parts. We move...
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Home: An Illustrated Celebration of the Genius and Wonder of Animal Dwellings
“There’s no place like home,” Dorothy sighs in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a place — it is a locus of longing, always haunted by our existential homelessness. “Welcome home!” a cheaply suited...
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What...
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify...
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Shame and the Secret Chambers of the Self: Pioneering Sociologist and...
There are certain experiences that shatter the eggshell of the self and spill the yolk of the unconscious, slippery and fertile, aglow with potential for growth. Shame is one of them — an experience...
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Facts about the Moon: Dorianne Laux’s Stunning Poem about Bearing Our Human...
“Hearing the rising tide,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, “there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all...
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The Merger Self, the Seeker Self, and the Lifelong Challenge of Balancing...
Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficulty of...
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How to Tell Love from Desire: José Ortega y Gasset on the Chronic Confusions...
“Loving is perennial vivification… a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming its...
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The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed...
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is...
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The Wild Iris: Nobel Laureate Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your...
“Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice.” A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and...
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The Work of Art: Inside the Creative Process of Beloved Artists, Poets,...
“The true artist,” Beethoven wrote in his touching letter of advice to a young girl aspiring to be an artist, “is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a...
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The Universe in Verse Book
“We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may...
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Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing
“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...
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Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of...
“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her...
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What It’s Like to Be a Falcon: The Peregrine as a Portal to a Way of Seeing...
“You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light.” We shall never know the sky, you and I —...
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Nothing: The Illustrated Story of How John Cage Revolutionized Music and the...
“We make our lives by what we love.” “After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music,” Aldous Huxley wrote. Silence is greater than music because it is its central...
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John Gardner on the Key to Self-Renewal Across Life and the Art of Making...
“The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges.” A person is not a potted plant of predetermined personality but a garden abloom with...
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On Giving Up: Adam Phillips on Knowing What You Want, the Art of...
“Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings.” “A self that goes on changing is a self...
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The Messiah in the Mountain: Darwin on Wonder and the Spirituality of Nature
Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams....
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No One You Love Is Ever Dead: Hemingway on the Most Devastating of Losses and...
“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.” Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more...
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The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind
“Every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.” “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote a decade before Darwin gasped at...
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