Sunday Best – June 8, 2025
Have you ever reconnected with a long lost friend and been astounded all over again by how lucky you are to have known such a person?
Some of our luck is lived out day to day, ever visible, and some of it rests in the background, quietly compounding across the years.
Dear ones, may we recognize our great good fortunes, the luminous webs of connection that set our lives aglow.
May we shine for others in return.
Sunday Best – June 1, 2025
After a long day of meetings in New York this week I rushed across town to catch the last half hour at the museum, where a soul-stirring exhibit of Hilma af Klint’s botanical drawings is on display.
At first these appear as lovely but innocuous scientific sketches, each leaf and petal carefully depicted with small neat labeling. But look a little closer and we see companion images tucked around the flowers, geometric forms echoing the natural patterns. Look closer still and museum labels note the artist’s accompanying text, such as this passage for the sunflower:
Love is the greatest of all.
From love originates always the power
to overcome hostility to God.
Wait, what?
Whether the exhibit reveals spiritual epiphany or artistic quirk, I am mesmerized, transported far from the stock tickers and business discussions that crowded the day.
Dear ones,
On our most hectic days,
may we sprint to the museum.
May we be captivated,
stirred and stilled by mystery.
Images from Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, and related MoMA exhibit.
Sunday Best – May 25, 2025
I returned bleary from a red eye flight straight into the arms of dozens of college friends at our school reunion this weekend. No matter how many times I visit campus in-between big events, there is something alchemical about being in the same place with the same cohort of people who knew one another so deeply at 18, when we were all just beginning to become.
When these ingredients combine, I feel that I am visiting with the most essential aspects of my own self – the parts that are hard to see sometimes, what with the rest of life all layered up on top.
Dear ones, may we greet ourselves arriving at our own doors.
May we love again the stranger who was ourself.
May we feast on our lives.
Love After Love, Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Sunday Best – May 18, 2025
A friend sent me this passage from Cormac McCarthy this week, and I’m delighted to share this gift with you.
Dear ones, may we seek the thread of order.
May we dictate the terms of our own fate.
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Sunday Best – May 11, 2025
Trade your cleverness for wonder. – Rumi
After a week of spreadsheets and earnings releases and Bloomberg alerts, it’s easy to get trapped in calculating mental loops, each more strategic and sophisticated than the last. Sometimes it’s a slippery slope from strategic to cynical.
Fortunately we are surrounded by antidotes. A single evening listening to actual humans make music leaves us lighter, connected. A single hour with a painting leaves us open, curious. A single minute with an unfurling fern leaves us hopeful, awestruck.
Dear ones, as my biomimicry teachers urge, let us quiet our cleverness.
Let us seek the wisdom of wonder.
Let us fill ourselves with earnest delight.
On this day especially, one possible source of wonder is to reflect on all who have nurtured us. Mother’s Day is complicated and painful for many, and at the same time we have all been mothered – by family and friends and teachers and communities and forests and lakes and pets and books and songs and selves. I am one of the very lucky ones who has been supported by all of the above – and most of all, luckiest of all, by my own dear mom, with the most steadfast love I will ever know. If you have ever cared for a person or place or idea with even a tiny fraction of this kind of devotion, thank you. You have made our world a better place.
* Photo from the mesmerizing Dakota Mace exhibit at SITE Santa Fe.