“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
“Living beings defy neat definition… We abide in a symbiotic world.” | Continue reading
“To possess the key is to lose it.” | Continue reading
“That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.” | Continue reading
Searching for the byway to the unconscious. | Continue reading
“We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others… There is a virgin forest in each.” | Continue reading
“Beyond the shaped and ever-shifting heaps of sand, beyond the ragged horizon of the purple-grey sea, the sun sunk as though it were sent in space.” | Continue reading
In praise of “the poetry of silence and darkness,” from which life emerges “fresher, fairer, sweeter for its long winter rest.” | Continue reading
A furry celebration of the dazzling variousness of this world. | Continue reading
“Time says ‘Let there be.’” | Continue reading
“Lives don’t work the way most books do… Lives are funny and sad, scary and comforting, beautiful and ugly, but not when they’re supposed to be, and sometimes all at the sam… | Continue reading
“Creation is a delicate and experimental thing… Knowledge and effective action here become one gesture; the gesture of understanding the world and changing it.” | Continue reading
“Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance.” | Continue reading
From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and transcendence. | Continue reading
A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life. | Continue reading
“There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.” | Continue reading
“To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.” | Continue reading
“The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the other’s warmth.” | Continue reading
Shamans, neurochemistry, and the metabolic byproducts of wonder. | Continue reading
“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.” | Continue reading
“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that… is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction… There can be no separate literature of scienc… | Continue reading
“Over a hill, at the end of a road, by a glittering stream that twists and turns, stands a house…” | Continue reading
“Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.” | Continue reading
“Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement.” | Continue reading
In the final years of a long life animated by optimism as a catalyst of democracy and the spring of action toward justice, Walt Whitman's aged baritone unspools from the only surviving recording of his voice to read a verse from one of his last poems, envisioning America as a "ce … | Continue reading
The Peanuts series by Charles M. Schulz (November 26, 1922-February 12, 2000) endures as one of the most beloved cartoons of all time, partly because of Schulz's gift for capturing the great, tender truths of human existence through remarkably simple, sometimes poetic, often humo … | Continue reading
"We love to contemplate blue," Goethe observed in his theory of color and emotion, "not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it." This particular color - or, rather, this universe of hues - seems to have drawn after it more minds than any other, inking the bod … | Continue reading
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896-December 21, 1940) - literary legend, master of the muse, deft hate mail responder, star of early book ads, and one wise dad - was also an unsuspected gourmand.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Finding that vitalizing “a reciprocity between us perceiving the world together through art, and the world in turn reading us through what we make.” | Continue reading
“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” | Continue reading
“It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness.” | Continue reading
"Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it... It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our 'self.’" | Continue reading