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The Managed Heart: Emotional Labor and the Psychological Cost of Ambivalence
What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the...
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The Dictionary Story: A Love Letter to Language Tucked Into a Delightful...
“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of thought and a medium of being. “Words are events, they...
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Kafka on Friendship and the Art of Reconnection
Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul beneath the costume of personality — that lovely Celtic...
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The Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create
“The powerful fear art, whatever its form… because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us… becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring.”...
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How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet...
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is...
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Delight Between Science and Magic: Euler’s Disk and the Sound of the Singularity
One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In...
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How to Love Yourself and How to Love Another: A Playful and Poignant Vintage...
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we...
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The Cosmogony of You
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from...
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Something in You Hungers for Clarity: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Writing and the...
“Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on,” Mary Shelley wrote in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars that...
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Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and...
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How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely...
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How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the...
Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it...
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A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox...
“A persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,” my beloved editor Dan Frank wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and...
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The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration
Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses...
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The Promethean Power of Burnout
“Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way. Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment...
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Some Blessings to Begin with
It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of...
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Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to...
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Don’t Waste Your Greening Life-Force: Hildegard’s Prophetic Enchanted Ecology
The year is 1174. Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not been discovered. Clocks, calculus, and the printing press have not been invented. Earth is the center of the universe, encircled by heavenly...
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The Hot Shower as Uncommon Prayer
One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through the shock of having a body, that we come most proximate to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman...
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Do Not Spare Yourself
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and...
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