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What Mother Earth and Father Time May Reveal About Consciousness There are two figures we have carried with us for so long that we rarely stop to consider what they actually mean. Mother Earth. Father Time. One is feminine. One is masculine. One gives us a place to exist. The other gives us a way to move through it. And somewhere between the two, perhaps, is consciousness. We call the Earth Mother for reasons that seem almost instinctive. She gives birth. She nourishes. She r

A reflection on identity, consciousness, and what the soul becomes through a human life. When we meet someone for the first time, we usually ask: What do you do? It is a reasonable question. We need somewhere to begin, and one’s occupation gives us an easy point of entry. It tells us how a person spends their days, what they know, and something about the world they move through. I say that I’m in the drapery and upholstery business. I have spent much of my adult life measurin

A father’s journey through grief, consciousness, and the mystery of what continues. There is a moment that occasionally arrives in conversation when I tell someone that I lost my son, Sam. It is rarely something I plan to say. The conversation simply reaches a place where leaving him out would feel less honest than speaking his name. So I say it. “My son passed.” And almost immediately, my attention shifts to the person hearing those words. I watch their expression change. I

The identities we weave—and what aging may ask us to loosen Penelope at the loom Saturday morning, I ran into a wise friend at the pâtisserie who shared a quote from a book he was reading. In The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric, John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro describe the individual as one “who is born a thread and dies a fabric.” We are born a thread. Then life begins weaving. We are given a name and placed within a family. Before we understand who we are, others

Cultivating Curiosity in the Age of AI The future will not belong to the child who can memorize the most. AI has already won that contest. Machines can summarize, calculate, organize, compare, draft, and explain. They are becoming very good at the tasks schools have traditionally rewarded. So the more urgent question is this: What remains human? Aravind Srinivas, CEO and co-founder of Perplexity, has argued that success in the AI age will depend not only on technical skill bu

What The Odyssey Taught Me About Aging, Identity, and the Journey Back to Ourselves I first encountered The Odyssey as a teenager. What held me then were the fabulous adventures: strange islands, angry gods, temptresses, impossible creatures, violent seas, and a hero who survived whatever the world placed before him. It was the kind of story a young mind could enter completely. Odysseus sailed beyond the edge of the known world. Each new shore promised another danger, another

Fifty years later, the country and I are still becoming. In 1976, America turned 200 years old. I turned 18. That has always felt like more than a coincidence. It was the year I graduated from high school. The year the country was wrapped in Bicentennial colors. Flags were everywhere. Fireworks felt larger than usual. History was suddenly not something trapped in textbooks. It was in the streets, on television, in parades, in speeches, in storefront windows, in the air. Ameri

My Problem with the Transcendental Meditation Pitch I went to the TM information session open-minded. I believe in meditation. I believe in silence. I believe the mind can settle, the nervous system can soften, and a person can become more available to the deeper currents of life. But what I heard did not feel like wisdom. It felt like a sales pitch wrapped in incense. What shocked me was not that they believed in meditation. I believe in meditation. What shocked me was the s

What Joshua Tree Reveals About Survival, Wonder, and the Soul There are places that impress you. And then there are places that enter you. Places that rearrange something quiet and hidden inside the body. Joshua Tree National Park is one of those places. You arrive thinking you are going to see a desert. A park. Some famous trees. Some unusual rocks. You arrive with the innocent arrogance of someone who still believes the world can be sorted into simple names. Desert. Boulder