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A Reminder

Alice’s Hunch

Dickens, I find myself thinking. Not Toulouse-Lautrec drawing in smoky bars, but Dickens; this morning I am Dickens walking around with eyes wide open, seeing a pure beam of humor illuminating human squalor.

The Lady Bard

Dancing

Miss Valentine’s School of Social Dance, jitterbugging in Calcutta, the “big girl’s ward” in the crippled children’s hospital

Sunbeams

From infancy I was surrounded by music. . . . To hear my father play the piano was an ecstasy for me. When I was two or three, I would sit on the floor beside him as he played, and I would press my head against the piano in order to absorb the sound more completely. . . . When I was eleven years old, I heard the cello played for the first time. . . . When the first composition ended, I told my father, “Father, that is the most wonderful instrument I have ever heard. That is what I want to play.”

Pablo Casals, Joys and Sorrows

Friend Of The Sun

Centering

In Pottery, Poetry, And The Person

Knowledge and consciousness are two quite different things. Knowledge is like a product we consume and store. All we need are good closets. By consciousness I mean a state of being “awake” to the world throughout our organism. This kind of consciousness requires not closets but an organism attuned to the finest perceptions and responses.

After The Fire

Howie got his guitar the day the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and he named it Elijah. It made a big impression on him: there he was in his living room tuning this new, magic thing, watching the tanks roll into Prague on television.

On Our Fifteenth Anniversary

Someone asked me recently how I raised the money — or, as he put it, the venture capital — to start The Sun. I told him it was easy: I borrowed fifty dollars from a friend.

This Longing: Versions Of Rumi