by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
“The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy,” Jack Kerouac wrote of tea in his 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. Late one night that year, he walked five miles with an enormous tape recorder strapped to...
by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence....
by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
In the early summer of 1816, weeks before her nineteenth birthday, Mary Shelley (August 30, 1797–February 1, 1851) — then still Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin — dreamt up Frankenstein on the shores of Lake Geneva in a creative challenge she and her companions, her...
by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
“Finding the words is another step in learning to see,” bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in reflecting on what her Native American tradition and her training as a scientist taught her about how naming confers dignity upon life. If to name is to see and reveal — to...
by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
“There is, in sanest hours, a consciousness, a thought that rises, independent, lifted out from all else, calm, like the stars, shining eternal,” Walt Whitman wrote in contemplating identity and the paradox of the self. Whitman lived in an era before the birth of...
by Jenni | Oct 31, 2018 | Latest News
“Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote in his classic treatise on transcendent states, “is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens.” The screen is sometimes a door that swings open into...
