Looking up

The human body is 99.999999999 percent empty space. Likewise, the cosmos is 99.999999999 percent empty space. Perhaps you have noticed what happens when we look up, when we notice space. The mind stops.

The being-ness of beauty

How does a single cut flower, so still, silent and surrendered, convene the attention of an entire room, then ‘float’ that room with beauty and aliveness and love? Well, not by doing anything.

Vincent’s boots

Facts are simple, essential and indifferent. Opinions are clamorous, contradictory and attention-seeking.

Darkness, my old friend

It is a thin and inconsequential book, the one that success writes. Failure, by comparison, is a playwright’s dream—dark, depthless and quiveringly quiet, like Robert Frost’s woods or Paul Simon’s blacked-out bathroom.

The butler

A quiet mind is like a well-trained butler—there when you need him, not there when you don’t, an absence made conspicuous by his occasional presence.

This guy’s butler enjoys the liquor cabinet. How loquacious, intrusive and opinionated he is, how comically self-important, how noisy and useless.