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The Night, the Light, and the Soul: Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Enchanting Moonscapes
“That best fact, the Moon,” Margaret Fuller called it. “No one ever gets tired of the moon,” Walt Whitman wrote down the Atlantic coast from her, exulting: Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal...
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The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important...
Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is...
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Turning from Peril to Possibility: Ecological Superhero Christiana Figueres...
Few things have maimed the spirit of Western civilization more than the myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden — a deeply damaging story about human nature, damning us and our relationship to...
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The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking
Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly...
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About War
“Outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders...
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A Tender Illustrated Celebration of the Many Languages of Love
That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human...
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The Majesty and Mystery of Night Migration, in a Stunning Poem Turned to Music
“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert. No...
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Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his...
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The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist...
“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.” “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in...
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Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude
“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in...
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How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the...
“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.” “An honorable human relationship… in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,'” Adrienne...
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Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life
“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.” We are each born with a wilderness of possibility within us. Who we become...
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The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the...
“Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is trying to...
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In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear
The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed...
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Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder
“The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.” “Emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological...
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Wonder Beyond Why: The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise
“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic...
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How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Light...
“The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.” Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter...
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The Sky and the Soul: 19th-Century Norwegian Artist Knud Baade’s Transcendent...
Nothing on Earth appears more divine yet attests more fully to the materiality of being than clouds — enchanting emblems of the water cycle that makes this rocky planet a living world, drifting across...
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The Power of a Thin Skin
“To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest...
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Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to...
The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to...
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