Before anything else, before the world and before the question of how to live in it, I had to know what I could trust.

Most of what is wrong with the human world, I have come to think, starts in one place. We are trying to be happy in a way the world will not allow. We chase pleasures that do not last. We take more than we need. We act as if the planet is a buffet that will be refilled in the morning, and we are surprised, every year, when something else has run out. The forests are smaller. The rivers are dirtier. The air carries the news of what we have done. None of this is hidden. We just

Many people around the world are leaving religion. You may be one of them. You may have grown up in a house that was certain about everything important, and as you got older you started to notice that the certainty was loud but did not always hold up. You may have asked questions and been told not to. You may have asked anyway. If so, you are not alone. People are doing this all over the world, finding each other in groups online and in person, helping each other work loose w

Life is a sandcastle. Every adult knows this. Most of us pretend we do not, because the pretending is easier than the knowing. We build the castle anyway. We decorate it. We argue with our neighbours about whose tower is taller. Then a wave comes, the kind that always comes, and we look at the wet sand and feel surprised. We should not feel surprised. We have known about the waves all along. We just preferred not to think about them.