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Between Mathematics and the Miraculous: The Stunning Pendulum Drawings of...
Emma Kunz (May 23, 1892–January 16, 1963) was forty-six and the world was aflame with war when she became an artist. She had worked at a knitting factory and as a housekeeper. She had written poetry,...
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Thunder, Bells, and Silence: The Eclipse that Went Extinct
What was it like for Martha, the endling of her species, to die alone at the Cincinnati Zoo that late-summer day in 1914, all the other passenger pigeons gone from the face of the Earth, having once...
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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture,...
“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.” “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,” William James wrote in his pioneering 1884 theory of how our bodies affect...
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John Quincy Adams on Impostor Syndrome and the True Measure of Success
“You will never get any more out of life than you expect,” Bruce Lee wrote to himself. All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are...
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On Wanting to Change: Adam Phillips on Our Capacity for Transformation
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.” When answering the Orion questionnaire, a question stopped me up short by contracting an...
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Swan Sky: A Bittersweet Vintage Japanese Meditation on Love, Loss, and the...
To me, what makes the majestic migration of birds so moving is that it is a living spell against abandonment. No one is leaving and no one is being left in this unison of movement along a vector of...
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A Glow in the Consciousness: The Continuous Creative Act of Seeing Clearly
“Simply to look on anything… with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.” There is no pure perception — of a flower, of a mountain, of a...
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The Beach and the Soul: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the Benedictions of the Sea
“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient… Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. Patience and faith. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a...
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The Pleasure of Being Left Alone
“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.” There is a form of...
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Befriending a Blackbird
Friendship is a lifeline twined of truth and tenderness. That we extend it to each other is benediction enough. To extend it across the barrier of biology and sentience, to another creature endowed...
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On Change and Denial
“It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm.” Central to our ambivalence about change is the...
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The Birth of the Byline: How a Bronze Age Woman Became the World’s First...
Days after I arrived in America as a lone teenager, the same age Mary Shelley was when she wrote Frankenstein, not yet knowing I too was to become a writer, I found myself wandering the vast cool halls...
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Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World
Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years...
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There Was a Shadow: A Lyrical Illustrated Celebration of the Changing Light,...
“Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty,” Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in the 1933 Japanese classic In Praise of Shadows. As a physical phenomenon, shadows are one of the most beguiling...
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Nobel-Winning Poet Joseph Brodsky on the Remedy for Existential Boredom
“Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath.” Time is the most private...
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The Sunflower and the Soul: Wendell Berry on the Collaborative Nature of the...
“We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or...
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What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible...
“It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real… It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory...
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Let the Last Thing Be Song
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.” A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this...
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The Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Love and the...
“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.” “To love without knowing...
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Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the...
“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.” “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone...
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