"Nourish yourself with grand and austere ideas of beauty that feed the soul... Seek solitude," young Delacroix counseled himself in 1824. Keats saw solitude as a sublime conduit to truth and beauty. Elizabeth Bishop believed that everyone should experience at least one prolonged … | Continue reading
“The thought that we must die… is the reason we must live well.” | 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
Rainer Maria Rilke (December 4, 1875-December 19, 1926) is one of the most prolific and poetic letter writers in history, a supreme master of what Virginia Woolf called "the humane art," with more than seven thousand of his epistles surviving today.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
In October of 1883, a paper in the nation's capital reported under the heading "Current Gossip" that "an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt" - a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in newspapers across the country that … | Continue reading
Friendship is one of life's greatest graces, and yet we hardly understand the gossamer threads of sympathy and love by which it binds us together. C.S. Lewis likened it to philosophy, art, and the universe itself in that "it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things … | Continue reading
“The handicaps under which Dr. Turner’s work was accomplished were many, and were modestly and bravely met.” | Continue reading
How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world. | Continue reading
"The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy." | Continue reading
Living into the risk and responsibility of the multiple identities we carry. | Continue reading
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.” | Continue reading
“Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does.” | Continue reading
On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self. | Continue reading
Nearly a century before Walt Whitman led us to see that "a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars," Immanuel Kant proclaimed that there will never be a Newton for a blade of grass. There may not be a Newton, but there is a Leibniz.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
A vibrant foray into “a perfect world of wonders” fueled by the bittersweet dimension of life. | Continue reading
"I am because my little dog knows me," Gertrude Stein wrote. Who hasn't found in the eyes of a beloved dog the most generous mirror, an infinity of love, and that soulful look that says, "If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled"?(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
"Fearlessness is what love seeks," Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. "Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future... Hence the only valid tense is the present, … | Continue reading
“Everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.” | Continue reading
The best things in life we don't choose - they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination - they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit. We have given a name to these unbidden greatnesses - genius, from the Latin for "spirit," denoting the s … | Continue reading
“Great genial power… consists… in being altogether receptive.” | 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
“Paths run through people as surely as they run through places.” | Continue reading
"The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence," Adrienne Rich asserted in her spectacular 1997 lecture Arts of the Possible . But it was exactly three decades earlier that another of humanity's most incisive intellects made the finest - and … | Continue reading
“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.… | Continue reading
On the emotional machinery that suspends us between rapture and tears. | Continue reading
A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being. | Continue reading
“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.” | Continue reading
"A self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood," Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of discipline and creativity. A century later, James Baldwin echoed the sentiment in his advice on writing, observing: "T … | Continue reading
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” | Continue reading
“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.” | Continue reading
Every creator's creations are their coping mechanism for life - for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“I believe talent is like electricity. We don’t understand electricity. We use it.” | Continue reading
“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.” | Continue reading
Reawakening to the rapture and responsibility of “a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.” | Continue reading
How to ferment our natural gifts into nectar for the world. | Continue reading
Just after the revolutionary work he recounted in Awakenings, Oliver Sacks wrote in a note to the music therapist at Beth Abraham Hospital: "Every disease is a music problem; every cure is a musical solution."(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.” | Continue reading
Few are those whose contribution to humanity - be it art, or music, or literature, or some other enchantment - fills the heart with uncontainable gratitude for their very existence. Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935-January 17, 2019) - one of the greatest poets of all time, and per … | Continue reading
Rodin believed that his art was about removing the stone not part of the sculpture to reveal the essence of his artistic vision. Perhaps this is what Catalan-born, London-based graphic designer Genis Carreras implicitly intended in chiseling away the proverbial philosopher's ston … | Continue reading
"We have to keep the channels in ourselves open to pain. At the same time it is essential that true joys be experienced, that the sunrise not leave us unmoved, for civilization depends on the true joys." | Continue reading
From Emily Dickinson to Bruce Springsteen, by way of galaxies and gardening. | Continue reading
Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life. | Continue reading
Jeanne Villepreux-Power (September 24, 1794-January 25, 1871) was eleven when her mother died. Just before her eighteenth birthday, she set out for Paris from her home in rural France, on foot - a walk of more than 300 kilometers along the vector of her dream to become a dressmak … | Continue reading
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.” | Continue reading
The sunshine of life springs from twin suns. We may call them love and art. We may call them connection and creativity. Both can take many forms. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. Both are instruments of unselfing.(themarginali … | Continue reading
In praise of the “voiceless, soulless messenger” that comforts and sustains. | Continue reading
On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian poet, philosopher, and musician Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861-August 7, 1941) - the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“Gifts transform the soul in ways that simple commodities cannot.” | Continue reading