Poetry and science—individually, but especially together—are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other.

tell stories about what is real and what is possible, and what it means to be.

Once there were flowers, there was fruit—that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.

We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty—the beauty of a

We shall by morning Inherit the earth. Our foot’s in the door.

To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live.

“Everything that is possible is real”—

our place in the cosmic order not as something separate from and superior to nature, but as a tiny pixel-part of it, imbued with equal parts humility and responsibility.

“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William Blake.