The world has been full of sensation for me lately, at odd moments. I don't leave my office much during the day: pretty busy, and it's usually too much hassle to drive somewhere for food, so I either buy a hummus wrap from Whole Foods in the morning or I get something downstairs at the cafeteria. I went downstairs and the light outside was familiar, somehow, gray but clear, overcast with just a hint of definition to the clouds--the ocean. It was the same coastal sky and air I've seen a million times on Cape Cod, paired with a gray or black North Atlantic, or a choppy Cape Cod Bay. I stepped outside and sure enough, the wind had changed and brought some salt air for me, pretty rare since down here we're shielded by a substantial series of hills.

And today, we had the most wonderful Pacific storm blow through. I didn't get the thunder and lightning, they were up north, but the wind and pouring rain just suddenly started, and the air cleared out and for several hours I had a lot less of that feeling in my bones that California is forever an alien land to me because I grew up in New England.

The world smells and feels and breathes. Can you feel the pulsing, the movement, the energy that flows between people, the cords that tie us all together? The unending patterns as we connect with each other, dance, move on, come together drift apart, continue on and on. It's an epic, the largest possible. Art doesn't give us something bigger than ourselves: it gives us something small, something we can take in and comprehend and relate to our own experience.