After resisting emojis for years, I slap them on willy-nilly, a quick nod that lets a text’s sender know I adore them and in an ideal world would write a long and thoughtful response. We are all too busy, and pictograms are fast and can be dismissive and friendly at the same time, ending an exchange that might otherwise ping-pong for far too long. But now I am told that the smiley face itself is not the least bit friendly.
I would not be at all surprised if figs, rather than apples, contained God’s knowledge. They are at once male and female, and I trust androgyny. Also, figs are not fruits at all, but hundreds of flowers turned inward.
At life’s start, we share a single heartbeat. We are connected to everything our mother feels and thinks. Now, especially when we love someone, our minds and bodies instinctively try to recapture a bit of that unity. We unconsciously mimic the physical gestures or posture of someone we like; we yawn when they do; we giggle just because they are laughing.
Hardly anybody who got addicted to Bob Ross’s show bothered to paint. They just watched, rapt. His encouragement was comforting, like a compliment with no strings attached: “You coulda gone pro!” “You should write a book!” No expectations, no judgment. Just a happy reminder that possibilities existed.
We expect so much more of ourselves than we do of dogs. We judge ourselves more harshly, compare more viciously. Granted, a show dog can outdo most narcissists in grooming hours, but that is the human companion’s doing, not the dog’s. Other animals do not judge themselves at all, and maybe that is what frees us to relate to them differently.
Who controls the corporations who control our news? A helpful index was just compiled—not by mainstream media, but by Harvard researchers exploring media’s future. Skimming the list, I see two names again and again: BlackRock Fund Advisors and Vanguard Group.
What makes the difference here? White man versus Black female? A harsh prosecutor, in Owens’s case, at a time with little oversight of the legal system? We will likely never know. But there is so much talk about inequity and injustice that it sometimes washes over me. Seeing the particulars unfold is a lot more painful.
For years we have heard the country’s name repeated as a hotbed of problems, but conflict in Afghanistan exists on two levels: disputes among its own ethnic groups, some of which are Sunni and some Shia, and comic-book-crude clashes between superpowers, zapping each other like Godzilla and King Kong above the mountain peaks.
When I was single and grumbling about it, my mother used to say, “All it takes is a day.” One shift of the kaleidoscope, one chance meeting, and bitter loneliness drops away and the world glows with promise. That fast, your life has a different direction, a different set of possibilities.This is how it must have felt, though in a very different context, for the conservators who first X-rayed Johannes Vermeer’s quiet painting, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window."
Dragonflies’ names tell the story: black darter, blue dasher, brown hawker, green darner, wandering glider, widow skimmer, four-spotted chaser. What would it feel like to fly that free?
The stamps do not lie: Their colors pop out of a solemn black background, and the skulls evoke grief, death, and decomposition as surely as poor Yorick’s skull did for Hamlet. But there is no sense of alas, no horror or repulsion. These are sugar skulls, delightful to take into ourselves.
Instead of trying to predict how soon the world will end or reaching for a static, reassuringly rigid worldview, we need to take in new information every day, brush our teeth with it, readjust our internal model of the world as we go.