"There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have n … | Continue reading
"It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing... or, rather, it meant everything... and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning... like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne." | Continue reading
“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…” | Continue reading
In search of the most transcendent solution to “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.” | Continue reading
An improbable celebration of the three most interesting things in life, the things that make it worth living: nature, human nature, and their cross-pollination in music. | Continue reading
The poetry of perspective, in unimagined shades of blue. | Continue reading
“Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface.” | Continue reading
"We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union... We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed." | Continue reading
Roses are blue, violets are ultraviolet, and beauty is made of chemistry and light. | Continue reading
“The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world… To see, to hear, to be human requires… our ceaseless participation.” | Continue reading
“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.” | Continue reading
“Nothing beats kindness… It sits quietly beyond all things.” | Continue reading
"Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world... For the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone a … | Continue reading
Sound, color, and wonderment where the body meets the soul. | Continue reading
“Children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.” | Continue reading
“People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too.” | Continue reading
An eighteen-year-old prodigy’s song of praise for the eternal consolation of trees. | Continue reading
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible. | Continue reading
"Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them." | Continue reading
Love, laundry, and the miraculous in the mundane. | Continue reading
“A history of exercise is not really — or certainly not only — a history of the body. It is, equally, perhaps even primarily, a history of the mind.” | Continue reading
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. | Continue reading
A two-wheel romp through the topography of progress from Victorian times to rural Spain to twentieth-century America. | Continue reading
Because grief, too, is a thing with feathers. | Continue reading
"Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time... not just the 'now'... or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal." | Continue reading
A song of praise for that place in us housing “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” | Continue reading
“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” | Continue reading
How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love. | Continue reading
“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause… We trace the round again; and are… Ifs eternally.R… | Continue reading
A vibrant celebration of flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.” | Continue reading
“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe… | Continue reading
“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” | Continue reading
A playful and poignant what-if for the planet. | Continue reading
“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux.” | Continue reading
In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to "make this world worthy of its children."(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Time-travel to the dawn of modern medical science via the stunning art of a self-taught woman illustrator and botanist. | Continue reading
“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” | Continue reading
“The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time.” | Continue reading
“To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in someway to make it possible for him to fulfill this expectatio… | Continue reading
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” | Continue reading
"When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is." | Continue reading
Aristotle, Alice, and a back flap. | Continue reading
“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” | Continue reading
“The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.” | Continue reading
"By reaching beyond the brain... we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone." | Continue reading
A lyrical reminder that our terror and our tenderness spring from the same source. | Continue reading
In his short life, Aubrey Beardsley (August 21, 1872-March 16, 1898) became a pioneer of the Art Nouveau movement and forever changed the course of the graphic arts. He was an artist of elegant and unsentimental exaggeration, and yet beneath his grotesque aesthetic lay a subtle s … | Continue reading
"We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe... We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune. … | Continue reading