The Sense Of Time

Look into a flower, and what do you see? Into the very heart of nature’s double nature — that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiring toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe ...

Our experience of flowers is so deeply drenched in our sense of time. Maybe there’s a good reason we find their fleetingness so piercing, can scarcely look at a flower in bloom without thinking ahead, whether in hope or regret. We might share with certain insects a tropism inclining us toward flo...

To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote in her pre-ecological poem about ecology, “is profound Responsibility.”

A century later, in one of the most poetic and existentially ravishing children’s* books of all time, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his hero’s central preoccupation the re...

Meaning, of course, is just what we make of life — what we make of our mortality as an inevitability of the universe that made us. “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so impo...