Over time I’ve come to respect the fact that linking my wonder at scientific discoveries to the knowledge of my heart is risky business. It’s tantalizing, for instance, to imagine that some marvel of the natural world is related to, or evidence for, a proposition about the ultimate nature of being—but taken seriously it never quite works. To “take it seriously” is to imagine that some stunning natural phenomena is the (ultimate) reality described in […]
I recently finished George Saunders’ latest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. In it, he takes seven short stories by famous Russian authors and talks about what works in them—what’s going on at a deeper level than a cursory read might reveal and why he can’t stop reading them himself. He intersperses this with discussions of his realizations as a human being and a writer. I loved it, but it’s taken me […]
The other night I got that inkling. A tickle of spaciousness. One minute I was trying to decipher an ambiguity in the building code, and the next I was alone in the room at dusk, standing beside the window, trying to decipher the ambiguity of a meadow. I relaxed, settled—something moved within me. Unity, like freedom, is the utter magnitude of being. Later that evening I witnessed the great truth of our moment: the real […]
This holiday season I received a gift subscription to Audible, and because I spend most of my reading time with works of fiction, I thought I’d use the daily commute for non-fiction. The first book I chose was Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker. For reasons I cannot explain, I found myself curious recently about the theory of evolution, how it has evolved with the emergence of genetics, and what some of the open questions and […]
There are periods in our lives when we make decisions with far-reaching implications. Doing nothing is hardly an option, and a few fundamental choices must be made that establish a line of action for the years to come. Deciding what you would like to study, do for work, or explore in life are examples of these decisions, but an even more important one is deciding what sources of information you will trust, or at least […]
[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [Part 4] When I was a boy who needed to be in nearly continuous motion on long summer days, lest I become bored and try to rappel off the porch using a clothesline, or hitch the family dog to my bicycle so we could pretend we lived in a Jack London novel, I went (briefly) to a summer camp about thirty miles east of Birmingham. I was dropped off […]
What does it mean to live from the heart? And why does it matter? In my experience, every difficulty I’ve ever faced has manifested itself as a rift between my heart and my mind—between what can be known most profoundly when words are left behind, and what presents itself as a seemingly irrefutable conclusion of the mind’s learning. When this happens we tend to look at circumstance as the genesis of difficulty, without realizing that […]
The sky in the distance is yellow because it is saturated with the living dust that is emitted by trees, who I happen to notice are standing quite silent on the matter of this atmospheric discoloration, as if you can do a thing little-by-little and it doesn’t count. But I see you can take a thing too far. Fresh from my coursework on the dangers of coffee dust and grain silos, I note that with […]
There are things we say sometimes to make a point– sweeping recapitulations of history, or statements of what is so in this world– and when we invoke them we do so as if they are self-evident. Obvious to those who would see. It is easy to forget how deeply we occupy our own lives and perspectives, and we can lose sight of the fact that what seems unmistakable to us is but the flowering of […]
I walked out into a field of grass and golden light to place my hand upon the sky, and spun the heart wheel. The world blurred into songs– the old ones, the ones that can fly– then became the memory of human heads nodding in the darkness as the truth was shared one to one. Knowledge poured out of me to join with the Directions. It told me that every tear will be wiped away, then […]
Embracing Forever 