A poem. A story. A hand-written note inside a card. An email. An essay. Writing. A complex behind-the-scenes process, with the brain working simultaneously, and in tandem across multiple areas to make it happen. So now that you have the pictures in your mind and all the words to describe…

Is passion a creative force or a destructive fire? — Passion is like Tàijítú (太極圖) a double-edged sword; made up of dualistic forces which are interdependent and cannot exist separate of one another, together forming a mutual whole. Without the the destructive forces of passion, one one cannot talk about the creative energy it harbours. Without the pain of pursuing…

A haiku on transience. — Does Life distinguish between a fading leaf and a man past his prime?

We’re not so different after all. — On a molecular level, there is only a tiny difference between the lifeblood of plants and animals. A molecule of chlorophyll in plants contains 36 atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon around an atom of magnesium. A molecule of hemoglobin in humans contains 36 atoms of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon around an atom of iron. Swap out iron to magnesium in a cell structure and your human blood is pretty much identical to plant blood.

Mysterious madam. — Widely regarded as one of America’s greatest and most original poets of all time, Dickinson largely withdrew from the world as a young adult. From her late teens through her twenties she adopted the more childish spelling of her name, “Emilie”. …

Food for thought. — Isaac Newton is best known for having invented calculus in the mid to late 1660s, and for having formulated the theory of universal gravity. Albert Einstein called him the smartest person who ever lived and the greatest scientific mind of all time. As a solitary child who didn’t engage in…

Brush your teeth. All of them. — The American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States, George Washington, was noted for not smiling very much. He had at least four sets of false teeth which he soaked in port overnight to make them taste better. He lost his…

Paranoid potentate. — In 259 BCE, there was no China. There was no unified group of people to call themselves “Chinese,” there was no empire, and certainly, there was no Chinese emperor. Qin Shi Huangdi, invented the title ‘Emperor’ (Huangdi) and called himself Shi Huangdi (‘First Emperor’). …

The trailblazing ‘Queen of the Desert.’ — Lady Hester Stanhope was the niece of William Pitt the Younger. In 1810, she left Britain for good, travelling through France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. Lady Hester was the first English woman to enter the Great Pyramid. She was shipwrecked in Rhodes, and from that day on…