I’m sure civilizations will still evolve through play, or rather as play, since that seems to be a fundamental mechanism of our humanity.
The well of nature is full today. Time to go outside and take a drink.
No matter how politely one says it, we owe our existence to the farts of blue-green algae.
There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.
As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie.
I hate the fearful trimming of possibilities that age brings.
The senses don’t just make sense of life in bold or subtle acts of clarity, they tear reality apart into vibrant morsels and reassemble them into a meaningful pattern.
So before I start work on a book, I’m like a pregnant mole – I obsessively tidy and order my closets and everything in my study. Because there’s such a cascade of images and ideas that I’m grapping with mentally, I couldn’t also be in a chaotic setting.
History is an agreed-upon fiction.
Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations.
One of the keystones of romantic love – and also of the ecstatic religion practiced by mystics – is the powerful desire to become one with the beloved.
Home is where the heart is, we say, rubbing the flint of one abstraction against another.
One of the things I like best about animals in the wild is that they’re always off on some errand. They have appointments to keep. It’s only we humans who wonder what we’re here for.
Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Disassociating, mindfulness, transcendence-whatever the label-it’s a sort of loophole in our contract with reality, a form of self-rescue.
Words are such small things, like confetti in the brain, and yet they are color and clarify everything, they can stain the mind or warp the feelings.
Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing...
For if I do something, I never do it thoughtlessly.
I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive.
Part of the irony of environmentalism is questing for solutions when you know you’re part of the problem.