Every day I spend working at a desk that sits three feet from where I sleep. Lack of insulation in my current house makes it possible for me to hear pretty much everything that happens within one hundred feet of my window. The busses up the street, people talking while walking their dogs, bikers and skateboarders trying to brake themselves coming down the hill, the couple with the teenager arguing loudly across the road, college kids coming home at 1am – these are the sounds that fill my …

I’ve long regarded myself as an intensely hungry person, though not in the physical sense. I don’t care inordinately about my dinner, save that it is healthy; yet, I’ve always experienced the world itself—the concept of it, the vast beauty and mystery of it, as something I desperately long to bring nearer in order to incorporate it into my(S)elf. I experience this longing as hunger to be spiritually and emotionally intimate with the world by “consuming” it—by “feeding upon infinity,” as William Wordsworth might say, as if my mind and …