Silence, Stone, and Story

A leaf holds my attention. Then I remember that I can draw. The pencil reveals things I had never noticed, but introduces its own demands: proportion, shading, the desire to make something beautiful. When I try to describe the encounter, language presents another difficulty. An essay about the uncertain distance between looking at something, understanding it, and being present with it.

We have become very good at measuring persistence, and less good at asking what deserves it.
A musician begins the same passage again. A writer returns to an unfinished sentence. Someone stands before a familiar face carved in stone, with nothing new to photograph.
What brings us back when enthusiasm has gone? And how do we distinguish devotion from the demands that quietly consume the rest of our lives?

Rain, a carved hand, and the small movements of lives separated by centuries. A new literary piece from The Vow.

Scientific consensus is not, in its proper form, an agreement to stop asking questions. It is the provisional agreement that emerges because questions have been asked repeatedly, competing explanations have been tested, and conclusions have survived sustained attempts to discover where they fail.