A heart willing to welcome someone else’s pain inside. A brain with the superpower of unlocking other psyches. Skin so tender, anybody’s mood will brush against yours—then penetrate. Empathy seems a noble trait, potent and generous, an instant cure for injustice and xenophobia. I watch “empaths” on my husband’s beloved Star Trek and […]
Artists select their palettes ever so carefully, but an old piece of parchment with all the colors, circled in a wheel or disciplined into a grid, their names inked gracefully beneath them? I can pore over those antique charts for hours. Seeing the colors ranged next to one another, like somebody pinned a […]
“You are under surveillance,” intones a disembodied voice. I look up, startled. My scalp tingles with honest sweat, and the sun warms my shoulders as I sling last fall’s leaves and broken tree limbs into a compost pile at the park. “You are under surveillance,” the voice repeats, its intonations flat. The pitch […]
Once upon a time, our parents’ social standing fixed us in place. Then our genetic inheritance. Then our environment. Nature, nurture, nature, nurture—back and forth the pendulum swung, which should have been a clue that the right choice was both. Even after we figured that out, though, we still thought in terms of […]
This is what it is like to be a layperson in the Years of COVID. “So my primary care doc said the vaccine loses effectiveness after six months.” “That’s what my pharmacist said, too. But nobody’s saying anything about a new booster.” “If you’re healthy, you don’t need a booster anyway, right?” “But I […]
Humans are the ones who fly straight into the flame. Lost causes, unrequited loves, crazy gambles, consuming addictions, dangerous exploits—we live bent, one would guess, on self-destruction. All the poor moths want to do is set a flight path. When their light sources were the moon and stars, all went well. But our […]
The stuff is everywhere. Bunnies dancing in the corners. Midair sparkles in a shaft of sunlight. A fuzzy white coating on my bookshelf, like thrush on a tongue. We were made from dust, or so it is said. Stardust lives in our bodies. How could anything so important seem so irrelevant? A swirl […]
Lacy, blossomed, branching, glowing in neon pink, green, yellow, purple, or orange—coral is a bouquet strewn on the sea floor. Who dives for fish when you can dive to be hypnotized by such beauty? Had I the courage to carry my breath in a tank, I would hang underwater for hours, trying to […]
Most of us remember well our first sight of a dead human body. Most often it is surrounded by the aura of silent respect, but also more than a little horror, as if catching sight of a ghost while singing a hymn in church. Roadkill, on the other hand, usually offers no […]
Before social media, Charles Darwin relied on a global network of colleagues who corresponded with him. Before AI, he used photos to study facial expressions around the world. Before Buzzfeed, he created quizzes about what emotion was pictured. Before Fitbit, he walked daily and counted his steps by dragging a flint […]
