Questions for a second look
Each field note begins with something ordinary and follows it until the ordinary becomes difficult to dismiss.
Around us
Can a Meaningful Universe Be Ownerless?
Why readability, proportion and relationship call for more than the word ‘chance.’
One Order, or Many Competing Hands?
Following coordination from a single cell to the conditions of a planet.
The Signature in Every Living Thing
How a small living form carries knowledge far larger than itself.
Can Nature Produce What Nature Contains?
Testing whether the name of a system can act as the maker of its members.
What Do Causes Actually Do?
A distinction between the conditions of an event and the source of its existence.
Within us
What Are You? Where Did You Come From? Where Are You Going?
Three plain questions that quietly stand behind every plan, fear and hope.
Are We Really Left to Ourselves?
What ability, responsibility and consequence suggest about a life that appears unsupervised.
Why Are We So Needy—and So Capable?
Human weakness beside an imagination that reaches beyond the visible world.
The Small “I” That Measures Everything
Selfhood as a useful measure—and a dangerous claim of ownership.
Why Does Conscience Resist Meaninglessness?
The inward measure that reacts before an argument has finished.
Why Can the Mind Know Much and Still Feel Lost?
Reason finds relations; the heart asks what those relations mean for a life.
Why Does the Heart Ask for More Than the World Can Give?
The persistent human desire for a good that does not expire.
Is Love the Problem, or Its Direction?
Keeping tenderness without making temporary things responsible for eternity.
When Pain Is Not Pointless
Suffering, limitation and the difference between being hurt and being abandoned.
What Gratitude Changes Before Circumstances Change
Recognition as a different way of inhabiting the same ordinary day.
A Daily Practice That Makes This Life Lighter
How regular attention, gratitude and directed devotion reorder the day.
Freedom Through Belonging to One
Why dependence on one absolute source can loosen dependence on countless lesser powers.
Ahead of us
Why Do Things Arrive, Stay Briefly, and Leave?
A field note on the continuous traffic of faces, seasons and living forms.
Everything We Love Is Leaving
Why attachment to passing forms can turn the capacity for love into pain.
The Weight of the Past, the Fear of the Future
How the meaning of time changes grief, regret and anxiety.
Does Death Destroy, or Change the Place of Life?
Examining whether disappearance from view is the same as extinction.
What Spring Says About Beginning Again
Renewal in nature as a rational analogy for restoration after death.
Can Justice Be Completed in One Short Life?
The moral remainder left when victims and wrongdoers leave the world unequal.
Is Anything Truly Forgotten?
Memory, preservation and the traces every event leaves behind.