“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
"The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake," the artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan wrote as she considered creativity and the nocturnal imagination. It is an insight that transcends the abstract imagination of art to reach into the heart of reason … | Continue reading
“At night, he came home with as many eels as he could well lift in one hand, which our people were glad of. They were fat & sweet.” | Continue reading
“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.” | Continue reading
“A work responds to the reader’s, not the author’s, questions.” | Continue reading
“What is that so-called reality; what is this theory other than a beautiful but primordially human illusion?” | Continue reading
Dive into “the world of the sea in its luxury and its agitations.” | Continue reading
"Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead," John Updike (March 18, 1932-January 27, 2009) wrote. "So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?"(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
What playing music has to do with the happiness of the forest. | 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
"There is more going on than we can see or understand, and we need to find a way to lean into the mystery of things.... and recognise the evident value in doing that, and summon the courage it requires to not always shrink back into the known mind." | Continue reading
“Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.” | Continue reading
“Everything impinges on everything else… Everything is potentially everywhere.” | Continue reading
“The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist.” | Continue reading
“We understand the people better if we know their music, and we appreciate the music better if we understand the people themselves.” | Continue reading
“People now use less than half their potential forces because ‘Progress’ has deprived them of the incentive to live fully.” | Continue reading
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” | Continue reading
“When friends are at variance, it is always better to employ no mediator, but to communicate directly with each other.” | Continue reading