Lensing Jung’s legacy through the light of thinkers as varied as Hannah Arendt, William James, Yuval Harari, and Oliver Sacks, Slater goes on to explore and celebrate the countercultural movement in the margins of this techno-trance — ways of seeing and of being that, unlike posthumanism, refuse to exclude beauty, eros, and transcendence from the human story, a story told in the language of the soul, irreducible to data. Complement with Iain McGilchrist on “it is necessary… to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light,” and that “everything in our lives depends on how we bear ..read more

Complement with Marie Howe’s stunning poem honoring Stephen Hawking, then revisit the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on laid the foundation of Western music ) and animated here by the talented (who has previously animated Joan as Police Woman singing Emily Dickinson ), the poem is an “Ode to Joy” for our own time and for the epochs to come, sonorous with what is best in us, sounding through the possible ..read more

Complement with Kahlil Gibran on and Christian Wiman on “a knot made of two intertwined freedoms,” ) — the 1902 masterwork based on his Gifford Lectures about science, spirituality, and the human search for meaning , which also gave us James on the four features of transcendent experiences the courage to weather the uncertainties of love , then revisit William James on (because, lest we forget, love is “the quality of attention we pay to things ..read more

from a previous season of Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem , then revisit Nick Cave on on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive. “My God, It’s Full of Stars” the antidote to our existential helplessness ..read more

Because the marks left on leaf veins by these death-bites are so distinct, evidence of them can be found in the fossil record as far back as the Eocene, nearly fifty million years ago — the dawn of modern fauna, a time when forests covered the Earth from pole to pole. Sheldrake reflects: seems to manipulate the mind through the backdoor of the body: Research indicates that the fungus may not have a physical presence in the ant’s brain, instead secreting chemicals that activate the ant’s muscles and steer its central nervous system (which we now know is ), mycologist Merlin Sheldrake details th ..read more

Less than a year after reports her boss deemed far too lyrical with the animated story of earned her the National Book Award as “a work of scientific accuracy presented with poetic imagination,” the television program , then revisit Carson on approached her to write “something about the sky,” in response to a request from a young viewer. how the clouds got their names writing and the loneliness of creative work the ocean and the meaning of life ..read more

Echoing Albert Camus’s insistence that — a superb read in its entirety — with James Baldwin on , she was always teaching her reader, as Stonebridge observes, not what to think but how to think — a credo culminating in her parting gift to the world: We Are Free to Change the World hope as an act of defiance the transcendent terror of new beginnings , and Bertrand Russell on the key to a free mind , then revisit Arendt on how we invent ourselves and reinvent the world the power of being an outsider ..read more

It can be confusing to live in the gulf between the life you have and the life you believe you’re supposed to be living. : the notion that a long-term monogamous romantic relationship is necessary for a normal, successful adulthood. This is a riff on the feminist writer Adrienne Rich’s influential concept of “compulsory heterosexuality” — the idea, enforced through social pressure and practical incentives, that the only normal and acceptable romantic relationship is between a man and a woman. Some of the first stories we hear as children instill compulsory coupledom, equating characters findin ..read more

Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder ..read more

I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow — the time — of the brook does not exist to me. The great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time. Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it alwa ..read more