Last time I expressed my dissatisfaction with the attempts Julia Galef made to understand the “other” in our lives, in this case Richard Feynman’s artist friend, who felt that scientific descriptions of things, to put words in the artist’s mouth, ruin them. What Richard reported his friend actually said, speaking about the beauty of a flower, is that “you, as a scientist, you take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” Richard at […]
Recently, through a series of clicks, I found myself watching a YouTube video of Julia Galef decrying the habit many of us have, in discussions with or about people who are different from us, of saying, “I just don’t understand how anyone could… [think, say, or do whatever it is the unfathomable ones in our lives think, say, or do…]” In her video she used the example of Richard Feynman, who once recounted a discussion […]
This post has been the most exciting of the series thus far for me to write, and that is because it is based on a fresh discovery to which I have a personal connection. Roughly a decade ago I attended a scientific conference organized by Dr. Gerald Pollack, then held annually in Vermont, on the subject of water. One of the speakers was Dr. D. James Morré, of Purdue University, a Distinguished Professor who published […]
When I was in high school I underwent one of those sea changes that sweep through us. My mother was hospitalized for a time for treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder, my dad lost his job, we made weekly trips down to the church’s food pantry, and eventually my parents separated. The real weight of it occurred during my senior year. One of the interesting things that came out of this was the freedom to leave […]
One day I looked Hafiz straight in the eye (his left if you must know) (my right) with the full faith and undeniable force of forty beleaguered years of human existence on this little planet of ours, which, in case you hadn’t noticed, is clearly going right down the same unsanitary tube as the one that we now call an asteroid belt, and I said half-jokingly, “Tell me the first thing that comes to mind.” […]
We’ll never know what it’s like to exist forever in a condition of perpetually transforming joy and goose-bump inducing discovery if we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility. It does sound pretty out there, but so don’t NASCAR races to German Shepherds. If we don’t consider it a very real and inevitable possibility, we’ll likely take something perfect and beautiful just as it is, something like space exploration or boat building or […]
The description I love best is that each of us is an intersection of matter and spirit, the above and below, the eternal and the present, of knowledge and mystery. I am tired of materialism—so very tired of its laborious absurdities, the dead ends it tries to pretty-over, the delicate faculties of the human being it would all but silence. Even so, I would not discard logic or rational thought. I would simply hold them […]
We had our first snow the day before yesterday—a sticky-heavy whiteness you could tamp into stable shapes—then a smattering more yesterday, and this morning I am witness to wonders I realize only now have been in the making for days. The third act is the revelation. Soft golden light pours sideways across the sky from a low-lying sun, and the second ridge is garnished with fog. The air and the land are rising together, drawing […]
For a while now I’ve been tip-toeing gingerly around this little tear in the fabric of my whole world and everything I’ve ever known or questioned or waved to from afar or shouted at or outsmarted or dreamed of lassoing with real jute rope or fallen in love with or skipped rocks across or retreated from or tripped over. Every time I ask Hafiz about cashing in what’s left of my heart for whatever it’ll […]
When I see a leaf as big as a baby elephant’s ear bouncing in sunlight, plunged like an open hand into a river of life-giving rays 93 million miles deep, and behaving so mysteriously— responding to the way of things with medicinal colors and chemistries only it can offer, as if flush with a secret I once discarded in favor of concocted ideas of legitimacy that involve passing out cards with my name on them in […]
Embracing Forever 