Symmetry breaking is one of the most fundamental concepts in theoretical physics. It is what gives rise to all the diversity that makes our life so rich and surprising. How boring would it be if everything was perfectly symmetric - and massless on top of that.  ...

  Seeing the first quail emerge around Little River is one of the classic signs that the Mendocino coast is tipping into late spring. Quail spend much of the wetter winter tucked into dense brush, salal, and huckleberry tangles along the meadow margins to stay dry and...

 Think in the Morning Poems Poem by Think in the Morning: A BeePoem by Think in the Morning: Analytic GeometryPoem by Think in the Morning: Basket CasePoem by Think in the Morning: Between the DaysPoem by Think in the Morning: Blake’s SongsPoem by Think in the...

 I’m waiting for the dragonflies. Darners, the long-bodied, fast, almost hawk-like dragonflies. Skimmers and Dashers, the ones you most often notice sitting on a twig. They perch, launch, and return over and over. They are blue, orange, and red and have patterned...

 The meaning of life is that it ends … Franz Kafka How do we live when life offers no clear script, and we still crave meaning? We can analyze, brood, knead the dough, and hope for loaves and fishes. We can ignore life's existential angst and float in The Unbearable...

 Know thyself … inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at DelphiBe yourself; everyone else is already taken. Oscar Wilde That old admonition “don’t force a square peg into a round hole” is a quiet philosophy of alignment. It asks a simple but difficult question: what...

This morning I noticed my dragon alebrije, Hugo, named after a friend who worked at Lucy’s Cucu Cabana in Puerto Vallarta for several years. The shop is gone and so is Hugo but the dragon lives in my house as a protector of great memories that might otherwise escape...

 Mistah Kurtz—he dead (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) The remark “excuse me for not dying”, which Leonard Cohen attributes to his Zen teacher Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, is one of those deceptively simple Zen statements that opens up the whole question of life,...

The force that through the green fuse drives the flowerThe force that through the green fuse drives the flowerDrives my green age; that blasts the roots of treesIs my destroyer.And I am dumb to tell the crooked roseMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.The force...