“Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself.”

A discussion with artist and naturalist Zoe Keller.

“It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, bravely, and complexly, matters the most.”

A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review. A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know. Clouds are almost as old as this world, born when primordial volcanos first exhaled the chemistry of the molten planet into the sky,… read article

“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held back more, been less expressive, stood on ceremony more often, forgiven less, spent more days ignorant of the secret desires and fears of the people around me.”

Gowan Dawson on his 3 greatest revelations while writing his book Monkey to Man.