Sentimentality and Being Mortal: Poet Mark Doty on the Passionate Fragility of Our Attachments

How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again recur in the history of the universe. The fact of each such singularity is a wonder beyon … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

Blue Glass

Not long after writing about the bowerbird’s enchantment in blue, I walked out of my house and gasped at the sight of what looked like two extraordinary jewels sparkling on a bed of yellow leaves, right there on the sidewalk — chunks of cobalt glass, much larger than what a broke … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Recreated in Hauntingly Beautiful Flower Pigment Prints via a Victorian Imaging Process

On September 20, 1845, the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom the word scientist was coined — sent a letter to the polymathic English astronomer John Herschel, who six years earlier had coined the word photography for the radical invention of c … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

The Two Souls Within: Hermann Hesse on the Dual Life of the Creative Spirit

"Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something eternal and as a happ … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a living reminder that h … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

Love and the Sacred

"I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 11 months ago

Of Wonder, the Courage of Uncertainty, and How to Hear Your Soul: The Best of The Marginalian 2023

Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape of living — after all, how we spend our thoughts is how we spend our lives. In accor … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 12 months ago

We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive

"Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 12 months ago

What It’s Like to Be an Owl: The Strange Science of Seeing with Sound

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” the great nature writer Henry Beston wrote in his lovely century-old meditation on otherness and the web of life. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted wi … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 12 months ago

Hermann Hesse on What Books Give Us and the Heart of Wisdom

Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others ha … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Favorite Children’s Books of 2023

Tender and poetic reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, deep time, and the interconnectedness of life. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Favorite Books of 2023

To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literature of the present comprises only a tiny fraction of my own reading, here are a handf … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Power of a Thin Skin

“To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Sky and the Soul: 19th-Century Norwegian Artist Knud Baade’s Transcendent Cloudscapes

Nothing on Earth appears more divine yet attests more fully to the materiality of being than clouds — enchanting emblems of the water cycle that makes this rocky planet a living world, drifting across our shared dome as if exhaled by some lovesick god. That we should have such a … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How the Sea Came to Be: An Illustrated Singsong Celebration of the Evolution of Life

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that invited the human imagination into the science and splendor of the marine world for the first time — a world then more mysterious than the Moon, a worl … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us

“The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Wonder Beyond Why: The Majesty and Mystery of the Birds-of-Paradise

“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective. This is … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder

“The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark c … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic

"Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is trying to express itself." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Paradox of Doing the Right Thing

“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in considering the ideal environment for creative breakthrough. All creative people, how … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality

“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Majesty and Mystery of Night Migration, in a Stunning Poem Turned to Music

“Night, when words fade and things come alive,” Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in his love letter to the hours of darkness, composed while flying alone over the Sahara Desert. No aliveness animates the nocturne with more grandeur than the migration of birds. … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

A Tender Illustrated Celebration of the Many Languages of Love

That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human communication is not the exchange of information but the exchange of understanding. If we a … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

About War

"Outsiders who are not themselves immersed in pain should make an effort to empathize with all suffering humans, rather than lazily seeing only part of the terrible reality. It is the job of outsiders to help maintain a space for peace." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The First Scientist’s Guide to Truth: Alhazen on Critical Thinking

Born into a world with no clocks, telescopes, microscopes, or democracy, Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (c. 965–c. 1040), known in the West as Alhazen, began his life studying religion, but grew quickly disenchanted by its unquestioned dogmas and the way it turned people on each other with … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Turning from Peril to Possibility: Ecological Superhero Christiana Figueres on the Spirituality of Regeneration

Few things have maimed the spirit of Western civilization more than the myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden — a deeply damaging story about human nature, damning us and our relationship to nature. Unthinkingly, we have perpetuated this story in our present narrative abo … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important Quality of a Visionary

Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world a … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Night, the Light, and the Soul: Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Enchanting Moonscapes

“That best fact, the Moon,” Margaret Fuller called it. “No one ever gets tired of the moon,” Walt Whitman wrote down the Atlantic coast from her, exulting: Goddess that she is by dower of her eternal beauty, [the moon] commends herself to the matter-of-fact people by her usefulne … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

May Sarton on Generosity

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the gen … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Lost Drop: An Illustrated Celebration of the Wonder of the Water Cycle and the Interconnected Ongoingness of Life

I remember when I first learned about the water cycle, about how it makes of our planet a living world and binds the fate of every molecule to that of every other. I remember feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I realized I was breathing the breat … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

bell hooks on Love

"We can never go back... We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago... All awakening to love is spiritual awakening." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation

We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Octavia Butler on Religion and the Spirituality of Symbiosis

“On many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Warped Side of Our Universe: A Painted Epic Poem about the Dazzling Science of Spacetime

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost: “Space may produce new Worlds,” he wrote, and grow rife with them. In the centuries since Milton, who lived through the golden dawn of telescop … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Blue Is the Color of Desire: The Science, Poetry, and Wonder of the Bowerbird

For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue. In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which h … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Alain de Botton on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind

“A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Starlings and the Magic of Murmurations: A Stunning Watercolor Celebration of One of Earth’s Living Wonders

Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, a mill … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

How to Be a Living Poem: Lucille Clifton on the Balance of Intellect and Intuition in Creative Work and the Healing Power of Connection

“I didn’t graduate from college, which isn’t necessary to be a poet. It is only necessary to be interested in humans and to be in touch with yourself as a human.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive

In his little-known correspondence with Freud about war and human nature, Einstein observed that every great moral and spiritual leader in the history of our civilization has shared “the great goal of the internal and external liberation of man* from the evils of war” as Freud in … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

To Be a Person: Jane Hirshfield’s Playful and Poignant Poem About Bearing Our Human Condition

“To be a person may be possible then, after all.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago

The Rigor of Angels: Human Nature and the Nature of Reality

“What we are striving for lies inside us; we find ourselves in the world and the world in ourselves.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 1 year ago