Through each cadenza, each sigh of poetry, each cue to shine spotlights on to the foot of the stage helps stave off life’s absurdities, which is really just another way of holding off the endlessly encroaching darkness.
Read MoreTAKING IT WITH YOU
None of us can carry all of our life experiences with us everyday, per se, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create ways to keep track of them. Just like runners arrive at each race through an accumulation of training and experience that leads up to the starting line, each of our lives can only be possible by an accumulation of experiences we choose to regard as parts of a much larger whole. When we break apart the moments of our lives into narrow, compartmentalized good moments and bad moments, we reduce ourselves to little more than highlight reels.
Read MoreHEART OF DARKNESS
Sweet things taste special precisely because they’re infrequent. They’re pure pleasure, but I’d never want a diet of chocolate and ice cream.
Read MoreI HAVEN'T MET YOU YET
None of us are born knowing all of the people who will have an influence on our lives. We accumulate those names over time, and soon thereafter they feel like they've always been a part of our experience.
Read MoreRON'S GARDEN
There’s never a way to know where you’ll find the creative process. People find ways to express it all the time, and sometimes it appears where you least expect it. Many people aren’t even consciously in touch with what motivates them to exercise their creative spirits. It simply emerges like flowers from the ground. In more easily identified, “traditional” artistic disciplines the trait is easier to spot; we recognize paintings and sculptures more easily than smart marigold beds.
Read MoreTHE SPHERICAL VILLAGE
Hanging like a jewel in the dark, the Earth shines as depicted on NOAA's Science On a Sphere, even in a grainy cell phone snap!
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THE CORAL SEA -- Copyright The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. All rights reserved.
BREAKING THE RULES
Here's a piece of art that breaks all the rules, and by doing so provokes something profound. It asks us in a way that all great and significant questions should be asked, in a clear, level, calm voice: “Do we truly understand the merits of the rules we claim govern our culture, our values, and our paths through the world?”
Read MoreTHE ROMANCE OF SPACE, THE IDEALIZATION OF NASA
People also care about NASA because it represents what's right about government, at least in principle. It holds out promise and hope that someone —someone—in charge can get beyond petty arguments about superficial things and actually bring something complicated--like a mission to another planet!-- into being. NASA represents the nation we wish were our own no matter what nation we call home.
Read MoreREMEMBERED
Will you be?
What about what the things you did?
Memories may be the ultimate human creation. By this I don't mean the memories you make for yourself. You have a head full of those. But when you create a memory for somebody else, good or bad, you've ever so slightly adjusted the calibration of the universe.
Read MoreRITUALS
Authentic rituals provide a solid place from which to push off. After than, anything is possible.
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