What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn? - Maria Popova

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe….We’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery — not of nature, but of ourselves.

Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,