Social Media Ideas for Annaka Harris

Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space...

How to Hold Death and Carry Life: A Zen Master Explains Existence to a Child and Outlines the Three Essential Principles...

"Zen practice ... requires great faith, great courage, and great questioning."

The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You

The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable. — “All things a...

Be Here Now: Ann’s Song

This song is meant to convey the tension of how quickly our babies change and grow up, while trying to soak in the moments that are happening now. It’s easy to look back on a few m...

Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Existential Tremors

"Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars."

How to Hold What Harrows You

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by...

Kindness Over Fear: Naomi Shihab Nye Tells the Remarkable Real-Life Story That Inspired Her Beloved Poem “Kindness”

"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, / you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing."

The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty

"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay."

The Author of ‘Number the Stars’ Still Believes in Human Decency 

Recently I participated in a conversation at my synagogue in Nashville about how to teach the Holocaust to our children. The table was long and the guest list spanned generations....

An Ecosystem of Her Own

Maren Hassinger’s alchemical touch transforms the most resistant materials into evocations of the endlessly changing natural world.

Something to chew on

The Black Robin and the Power of Tenacious Tenderness: How a Single Mother Brought an Entire Species Back from the Brink...

This essay is adapted from Traversal. “In the great chain of cause and effect,” Alexander von Humboldt wrote as he was teaching science to read the poetry of nature, “no single fac...

A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go

The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to...

PIA IN THE FOREST

Pia, a small, caninelike character, awakens with the urge to create a pine-cone person using objects from nature. Her dad suggests an excursion to a nearby pine forest, and Pia agr...

How Humanity Saved the Ginkgo

Pressed between the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland — a favorite book of my childhood, which my grandmother used to read to me and which still dwells in her immense libra...

She Lost Her Memory, Then It All Came Back

At fifteen, Ruth Brigandi woke up without language, without a name, without any sense of where her body ended and the world began. For four months, she existed in a state of pure,...

Hidden Answers.

After my unexpectedly emotional reaction to Hill’s rentree, I spent some time mining for meaning. My first thought: sometimes motherhood just nails you out of the blue, no reason o...

How to Hold the Darkness: Notes on Living Through Uncertainty

There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava th...

BETWEEN

“Between day / and night,” a moth flies by, flutteringly releasing a contrail of magical dust. “Between near / and far,” a cricket rests on a leaf, watching a waning crescent moon...

The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very...

“One and No One,” by Gabriel Winslow-Yost

When the angel came to Craig, he was seven, squatting in the outhouse at camp.

The Tree and the River: A Wordless Love Letter to How Nature Always Wins

Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A s...

The Art of Looking: Eleven Ways of Viewing the Multiple Realities of Our Everyday Wonderland

"Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you."

How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all...