From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time through the portal of beauty. | Continue reading
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see -- who and what we are -- to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called … | Continue reading
“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” | Continue reading
What it takes “to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance.” | Continue reading
“There can never be enough time. And you can never hold on to it.” | Continue reading
"Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so." | Continue reading
Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself. | Continue reading
“She cried, and kissed my hands, but she loves another.” | Continue reading
The meaning of life has been contemplated by just about every thinking, feeling, breathing human being, and memorably so by a number of cultural icons, including Carl Sagan, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, David Foster Wallace, Richard Feynman, and other luminaries.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer John Dewey (October 20, 1859-June 1, 1952) is one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century. His enduring insight on the true purpose of education and the art of reflection and fruitful curiosity resonates today with … | Continue reading
“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.” | Continue reading
Notes on the change that begins in the heart. | Continue reading
"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age." | Continue reading
“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” | Continue reading
"To be a flower," Emily Dickinson wrote in her prescient ode to the interconnectedness of nature, "is profound responsibility." A passionate lifelong gardener, the poet had fallen under the spell of wildflowers while composing her astonishing herbarium as a teenager.(themarginali … | Continue reading
In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.” | Continue reading
“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.” | Continue reading
“…if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist…” | Continue reading
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.” | Continue reading
A haunting invitation to reckon with the relationship between nature and human nature, consumption and creativity, and the mind’s indomitable capacity for playful wonderment. | Continue reading
"I embrace you with all my heart," Albert Camus wrote in his beautiful letter of gratitude to his childhood teacher shortly after winning the Nobel Prize. To embrace one another with our whole hearts is perhaps the greatest act of recognition and appreciation there is.(themargina … | Continue reading
"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself... to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is," Iris Murdoch wrote in a 1970 masterpiece - a radical idea in her era and in her … | Continue reading
“To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience.” | Continue reading
“Our foot’s in the door.” | Continue reading
“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.” | Continue reading
“There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.” | Continue reading
“There had never been such a quiet day before. It was the quietest day in the world.” | Continue reading
“We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.” | Continue reading
More than a century after Goethe's theoretical inquiry into the emotional hues of color, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907-July 13, 1954) contemplated the question from a far more intuitive place in a fragment from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library ) - t … | Continue reading
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.” | Continue reading
"Finding the words is another step in learning to see," bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her lyrical love letter to moss. And so it is: Description and observation entwine in the consecrating act of paying attention - the act that swings open the gates of perception and al … | Continue reading
A technicolor serenade to the variousness of this world. | Continue reading
“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.” | Continue reading
“A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work.” | Continue reading
"I think if I could subsist on you... I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent... I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around." | Continue reading
On that singular moment at the end of life when all creative energy is concentrated and consecrated. | Continue reading
“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.” | Continue reading
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place." | Continue reading
“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.” | Continue reading
"We are ourselves creating our own successors... We are daily giving them... that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race." | Continue reading
“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” | Continue reading
A fluid serenade to this blue world, with a side of Rebecca Solnit. | Continue reading
"People ask: 'Would you or would you not like to be young again?' Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible... You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no 'you' except your life — lived." | Continue reading
“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.” | Continue reading
“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.” | Continue reading
“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” | Continue reading
“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.” | Continue reading