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The Light in the Abyss Between Us
Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you. I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he...
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On Love: Saint Paul and the Egret
Among the myriad things that didn’t have to exist — music, minds, the meadow lark — none is more symphonic, more defiant of logic, more capable of winging existence with life than love. Biologically,...
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How to Make America Great: A Visionary Manifesto from the Woman Who Ran for...
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Papers declared her...
View ArticleForgiveness
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more...
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Change, Presence, and the Imperative of Self-Renewal: Existential Lessons...
“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so...
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On Consolation: Notes on Our Search for Meaning and the Antidote to Resignation
The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never unhappen it. Even forgiveness, for all its elemental power, can never bend the arrow of time, can only ever salve the hole it makes in the...
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Darwin on How to Evolve Your Imagination
The year the young Charles Darwin (February 12, 1809–April 19, 1882) boarded The Beagle, Mary Shelley contemplated the nature of the imagination in her preface to the most famous edition of...
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Your Soul Is a Blue Marble: How to See with an Astronaut’s Eyes
When the first hot air balloonists ascended into the skies of the eighteenth century, they saw rivers crossing borders and clouds passing peacefully over battlefields. They saw the planet not as a...
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The Lily vs. the Eagle: D.H. Lawrence on the Key to Balancing Mutuality and...
If you live long enough and wide enough, you come to see that love is simply the breadth of the aperture through which you let in the reality of another and the quality of attention you pay what you...
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Gary Snyder on How to Unbreak the World
“What we’d hope for on the planet is creativity and sanity, conviviality, the real work of our hands and minds.” “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in her poem “The...
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Reworldling Humanity: E.B. White’s Magnificent 1943 Response to a Politician...
On September 11, 1943, E.B. White (July 11, 1899–October 1, 1985) reported on the pages of The New Yorker that Clarence Buddhington Kelland — a writer prolific and popular in his lifetime, now...
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An Illustrated Love Letter to Words and the Meaning Between Them
Growing up immersed in theorems and equations, I took great comfort in the pristine clarity of mathematics, the way numbers, symbols, and figures each mean one thing only, with no room for...
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The Stubborn Art of Turning Suffering into Strength: Václav Havel’s...
“I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me,” Oscar Wilde wrote from prison. “There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of...
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How to See the Golden Light: Oliver Sacks in Love
“The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to...
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Living Against Time: Virginia Woolf on the Art of Presence and the “Moments...
In praise of “the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.” “Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains...
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19-year-old Simone de Beauvoir’s Resolutions for a Life Worth Living
We move through the world feeling inevitable, and yet we are the flotsam of otherwise — how many other ways the atoms could have fallen between the Big Bang and this body, how many other ways this life...
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Edward Abbey on How to Live and How to Die: Immortal Wisdom from the Park...
The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get...
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Meeting the Muse at the Edge of the Light: Poet Gary Snyder on Craftsmanship...
It is tempting, because we make everything we make with everything we are, to take our creative potency for a personal merit. It is also tempting when we find ourselves suddenly impotent, as all...
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Matrescence: The Cellular Science of the Unself
One of the most discomposing things about the sense of individuality is the knowledge that although there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, there is but one way to come alive — through the...
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The Souls of Animals
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty...
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