There are always more questions. Science as a process is never complete. It is not a foot race, with a finish line.... People will always be waiting at a particular finish line: journalists with their cameras, impatient crowds eager to call the race,...
We believe that it is possible for scientific work to gain some knowledge about the reality of the world, by means of which we can increase out power and in accordance with which we can arrange our life. If this belief is an illusion, then we are in ...
Reflection comes between us and every other person and object in the world. An object or a person can be reflected in so many different ways. Yet the heart of an object or the essence of the heart can never be reflected. All faith and creativity is t...
Out of the noise of tired people working, Harried with thoughts of war and lists of dead, His beauty met me like a fresh wind blowing, Clean boyish beauty and high-held head. Eyes that told secrets, lips that would not tell them, Fearless and shy the...
We depend upon other creatures and survive by their deaths. To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clum...
Maybe scientists are fundamentalist when it comes to defining in some abstract way what is meant by 'truth'. But so is everybody else. I am no more fundamentalist when I say evolution is true than when I say it is true that New Zealand is in the sout...
Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great s...
The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can ma...
Like night dreams, stores often use symbolic language, therefore bypassing the ego and persona, and traveling straight to the spirit and soul who listen for the ancient and universal instructions embedded there. Because of this process, stories can t...
I took her into bed with me and propped myself up with pillows against the headboard to let her nurse. As she nursed and the milk came, she began a little low contented sort of singing. I would feel milk and love flowing from me to her as once it had...
Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and...
Every friendship travels at sometime through the black valley of despair. This tests every aspect of your affection. You lose the attraction and the magic. Your sense of each other darkens and your presence is sore. If you can come through this time,...
The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is ...
Transience is the force of time that makes a ghost of every experience. There was never a dawn, regardless how beautiful or promising, that did not grow into a noontime. There was never a noon that did not fall into afternoon. There was never an afte...
Agriculture must mediate between nature and the human community, with ties and obligations in both directions. To farm well requires an elaborate courtesy toward all creatures, animate and inanimate. It is sympathy that most appropriately enlarges th...
We can say without exaggeration that the present national ambition of the United States is unemployment. People live for quitting time, for weekends, for vacations, and for retirement; moreover, this ambition seems to be classless, as true in the exe...
I am doing the best I can. I am hoping I am good enough. I am holding you close, as close as I can, hand cradling your head and breath on your hair, my whole body curved around yours, sheltering you as best I can, trying to remember that I cannot kee...
In poems, equally as in philosophic disquisitions, genius produces the strongest impressions of novelty while it rescues the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
BAIT GOAT There is a distance where magnets pull, we feel, having held them back. Likewise there is a distance where words attract. Set one out like a bait goat and wait and seven others will approach. But watch out: roving packs can pull your word a...
Birds that love high trees and winds and riding flailing branches hate ledges as gripless and narrow, so that a tail is not just no advantage but ridiculous, mashed vertical against the wall. You will have seen the way a bird who falls on skimpy plac...
Flora took pleasure in the delicacy of her approach and studied the ways of the smallest, sweetest blooms she could find, tiny pimpernels and forget-me-nots hiding in the pockets of the fields. The energy of the sun on her body and the joy of foragin...
