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Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way: A Tender Lunar Allegory about the Stubborn Courage...
“But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.” We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion and...
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From the Labor Camp to the Pantheon of Literature: How Dostoyevsky Became a...
“I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.” Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s...
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Audubon on Other Minds and the Secret Knowledge of Animals
“In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” Henry Beston...
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The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem
In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of...
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Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown
It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the...
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The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of...
“We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.” Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter,...
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Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference...
“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship,...
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The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning
One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her...
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An Illustrated Ode to Love’s Secret Knowledge
When Dante wrote of “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars,” he was shining a sidewise gleam on the secret knowledge of the universe, the knowledge by which everything coheres. All love is an...
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Between Encyclopedia and Fairy Tale: The Wondrous Birds and Reptiles of...
Imagine a world of constant wars and deadly plagues, a world without eyeglasses, bicycles, or sanitation. Imagine being a gifted child in that world, knowing you are born into a body that will never be...
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The Consolations of Chronodiversity: Geologist Turned Psychologist Ruth Allen...
“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we live here...
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From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem...
“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.” We are each a chance constellation of elements forged in long-dead stars assembled by gravity, which may be...
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Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl
“If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others.” Among the things I most cherish about science is the way it anneals curiosity. True curiosity is an open...
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Winnicott on the Psychology of Democracy, the Most Dangerous Type of Person,...
In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienced that...
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How to Triumph Over the Challenges of the Creative Life: Audubon’s Antidote...
We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history...
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How We Become Ourselves: Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Human Development
It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into...
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Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America
“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words...
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The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn
There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living...
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Don’t Waste Your Wildness
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into...
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Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship
People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they...
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