For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

How astonishing that being bathed in rays of light from a 4.6-billion-year-old mass of hydrogen and helium located 93 million miles away can make us feel happy?

By convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness; in reality there are atoms and space. —DEMOCRITUS

Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are very scary moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet m

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly t

One of the last things he said to me was “I’m sorry.” I could not understand, for many years, why he could possibly be apologizing to me. I should have been apologizing to him. He was the one who was in so much pain. He was the one who was dying. But he understood what I was too shocked to grasp. This would be the defining event of my life. Every o

Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning.

Growing up in our home, there was no conflict between science and spirituality. My parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence, and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent—quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” It applies to nations, religions, philosophies, and cultures, too.