Dear friends,   To walk through a home where you once lived, to see someone to whom you once felt connected, to re-read a book you loved as a child—these are often deeply disappointing experiences. The walls of your old bedroom seem much closer to each other than they once did. Your old friend’s eccentricities,…

Dear friends,   Once, I took a wheel throwing class. I was there for two hours and in all that time I didn’t make anything. I tried my best to mold the clay on the wheel into something that looked nice or, at the very least, would hold up in the kiln, but I walked…

Dear friends,   I’ve been listening to this song over and over again called “Stay Home” by American Football. There are only a few lyrics, but they go:   Don’t leave home again If empathy takes energy   Funny, though, because where else to empathize but home? If I could, I’d take off and fly…

Dear friends,   Antoine Roquentin stared at the roots of a tree and thought about his own superfluity, denied and generated simultaneously the concept of existence. My own mind is a little limited in comparison; I stare at something I hope to understand and, over time, my thinking degenerates. I wonder how my dog with…

Dear friends,   Around the North and South poles, glaciers have formed over thousands of years of snowfall accumulation, each year’s fresh snow compressing past layers to create glacial ice. Researchers drill over a mile deep into these glaciers to retrieve what are called ice cores, cylindrical relics of the deep past. Ice, in capturing…