The adventures of an insatiable wonderer.
"It's the greening of the leaves that really gets to me."Ada Limón My daily dose of excitement for the past month has come from waking up every morning to the tree outside my window. Just a few weeks ago, its knobby branches were covered only in grey buds. I wondered whether and when they would... Continue Reading →
"The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it." —Anton Chekhov I am sitting in a cafe, eating a warm baguette with salty butter. My body is satisfyingly sore from a morning run. My breath is slow and soft. My mind is puzzling over the complex concept of happiness, tangled in philosophy and... Continue Reading →
“A human being is part of a whole called by us universe.” — Albert Einstein This week I finally put into words what I’ve been learning and thinking about connection, community, and loneliness since I left the familiarity of my world in New York and unexpectedly began to build a new life and a new... Continue Reading →
Do the thing you think you cannot do. — Eleanor Roosevelt This week I have been immersed in yoga teacher training, diving into the history, philosophy, and science behind why moving around in a room with other people can make us feel so good. That’s where I learned about the muscle spindle stretch receptor, which can... Continue Reading →
I am not only what I do, but also what I do not. — John Fowles Every few seconds, whether we realize it or not, our brain sends a signal down our spine telling our diaphragm to contract, enlarging our chest cavity and allowing our lungs to expand and air to be pulled in through our... Continue Reading →
I run, therefore I am. — Hal Higdon In October 2017, I ran the Amsterdam marathon in 3:27:24, a personal best and Boston-qualifying time. I had gotten a total of eight hours of sleep in the three days leading up to the race. I almost missed my flight from Paris to Amsterdam because I could barely... Continue Reading →
There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. — Mark Twain I am a stickler for a consistency, notoriously never permitting my team to submit a legal brief without making sure that every use of ellipses is proper: “word … word” — not “word… word” or “word . . . word.” So it... Continue Reading →
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me, I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. — Frank Herbert I never thought I’d find myself inside a gentlemen’s club... Continue Reading →
A people without knowledge of their past origin, history, and culture, is like a tree without roots. — Marcus Garvey This week I learned that there is such a thing as a Strawberry Tree. It certainly deserves its name, even if it (sadly) doesn’t actually produce strawberries. A dense, bushy tree reaching up to 40... Continue Reading →
What I Learned this Week 