Inspiration: Essays & Musings

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the...

From filmmaker Michael More: "This morning I have been pondering a nearly forgotten lesson I learned in high school music. Sometimes in band or choir, music requires players or singers to hold a note longer than they actually can hold a note. In those cases, we were...

These two quotations seem to go together somehow. Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, using the analogy of a rolled up newspaper, a tube, to explain the limitations of our vision. And then Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Astrophysicist, whose world is expanded by looking...

by Susan Ives There's a meme going around that says, “Of all the things I learned in elementary school, avoiding cooties was the last one I expected to use.” Are cooties still a thing? The kids from the old neighborhood – all of us in our 60s now – gave that a thumbs...

"I live in Plum Village, in the Dordogne region of southwest France, an area known for its sunflowers. But people who come to Plum Village in April do not see any sunflowers. They hear people saying that there are many sunflowers around, but they cannot see them...

At Half Price Books the other day I picked up a copy of five short pieces by Denis Diderot, the 18th Century French philosopher of the Enlightenment: This is Not a Story and other stories, a new translation by P.N. Furbank. (Oxford University Press, 1991) The last...

In Karen Armstrong's book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life she quotes Confucius, who said that the family is the first school of compassion. I've been thinking lately about how that applied to my family. Three things that  I learned when I was three — and my...