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An Illustrated Field Guide to the Science and Wonder of the Clouds
Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought....
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200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative...
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is...
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Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance
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...
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Is Your Life a Fairy Tale, a Novel, or a Poem?
When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We...
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Beyond Either/Or: Kierkegaard on the Passion for Possibility and the Key to...
“Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility.” Some of the most...
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An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days
I have found that the surest way of seeing the wondrous in something ordinary, something previously underappreciated, is coming to love someone who loves it. As we enter each other’s worlds in love —...
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What Makes Life Alive: Vassily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness
“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones: What is life? Where does it begin and end?...
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Grace Paley on the Countercultural Courage of Imagining Other Lives
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her superb investigation of the parallels between art and morality. There could be no such...
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Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and...
“Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment.” There are experiences in life that strike at the center of our being, sundering us in half with unforeseen pain for which we...
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How to See More Clearly and Love More Purely: Iris Murdoch on the Angst of...
One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to...
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Your Voice Is a Garden: Margaret Watts Hughes’s Wondrous Victorian Sound...
“I hear bravuras of birds… I hear the sound I love, the sound of the human voice,” Walt Whitman exulted in his ode to the “puzzle of puzzles” we call Being. How puzzling indeed, and how miraculous,...
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Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life
Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it...
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Batter My Heart: Love, the Divine Within, and How Not to Break Our Your Own...
There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is...
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We Go to the Park: A Soulful Illustrated Meditation on Our Search for Meaning
“Sometimes it feels as if all of life is made up of longing.” My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between...
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The Art of Withstanding Abandonment: The Patience of the Penguin and How...
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and...
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Turning to Stone: A Geologist’s Love Letter to the Wisdom of Rocks
Among the great salvations of my childhood were the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our next door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water. I...
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Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship
“A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other...
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Honing Life on the Edges of the Possible: Geologist Turned Psychoanalyst Ruth...
“At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture...
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You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic...
“The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.” In her stunning space-bound ode to the human condition inspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome...
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How to Miss Loved Ones Better: The Psychology of Waiting and Withstanding...
On “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.” With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening...
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