Emma Kunz (May 23, 1892–January 16, 1963) was forty-six and the world was aflame with war when she became an artist. She had worked at a knitting factory and as a housekeeper. She had written poetry, publishing a collection titled Life in the interlude between the two World Wars. Having lost two of her siblings to childhood illness, then both her surviving...

“Every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants.” “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote a decade before Darwin gasped at how incomprehensible “the marvelous complexity” of organic beings is, insisting that “each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm — a little...

“We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other.” Along the spectrum of losses, from the door keys to the love of one’s life, none is more unimaginable, more incomprehensible in its unnatural violation of being and time, than a parent’s loss of a child. Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899–July 2, 1961) was in his twenties...

Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams. “I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that beauty, those fated and unfailing appearances and exits, are something more than mathematics and...

“Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings.” “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote. Nothing is more vital to the capacity for change than the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind —...

“The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life’s challenges.” A person is not a potted plant of predetermined personality but a garden abloom with the consequences of chance and choice that have made them who they are, resting upon an immense seed vault of dormant potentialities. At any given moment,...