"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
From geckos to chameleons, a scaly journey down the hallway of evolutionary time through the portal of beauty. | 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
“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” | Continue reading
What it takes “to think abstract problems through on several planes at the same time, to stay alert for symbolic and allegorical meanings, to appreciate the utility of nuance.” | Continue reading
“There can never be enough time. And you can never hold on to it.” | Continue reading
"Sometimes we are hurt. Sometimes we hurt others, whether intentionally or not. The path of repentance is one that can help us not only to repair what we have broken, to the fullest extent possible, but to grow in the process of doing so." | Continue reading
Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself. | Continue reading
“She cried, and kissed my hands, but she loves another.” | Continue reading
The meaning of life has been contemplated by just about every thinking, feeling, breathing human being, and memorably so by a number of cultural icons, including Carl Sagan, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, David Foster Wallace, Richard Feynman, and other luminaries.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer John Dewey (October 20, 1859-June 1, 1952) is one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century. His enduring insight on the true purpose of education and the art of reflection and fruitful curiosity resonates today with … | Continue reading
“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.” | Continue reading
Notes on the change that begins in the heart. | Continue reading
"The truth is that we are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of a world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age." | Continue reading
“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” | Continue reading
"To be a flower," Emily Dickinson wrote in her prescient ode to the interconnectedness of nature, "is profound responsibility." A passionate lifelong gardener, the poet had fallen under the spell of wildflowers while composing her astonishing herbarium as a teenager.(themarginali … | Continue reading
In praise of “the necessary and urgent need to love life and one another, despite the casual cruelty of the world.” | Continue reading
“The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.” | Continue reading
“…if the Great Mother rushed open the moon like a gift and you were there to feel your shadow finally unhooked from your wrist…” | Continue reading
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.” | Continue reading
A haunting invitation to reckon with the relationship between nature and human nature, consumption and creativity, and the mind’s indomitable capacity for playful wonderment. | Continue reading
"I embrace you with all my heart," Albert Camus wrote in his beautiful letter of gratitude to his childhood teacher shortly after winning the Nobel Prize. To embrace one another with our whole hearts is perhaps the greatest act of recognition and appreciation there is.(themargina … | Continue reading
"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself... to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is," Iris Murdoch wrote in a 1970 masterpiece - a radical idea in her era and in her … | Continue reading
“To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience.” | Continue reading
“Our foot’s in the door.” | Continue reading
“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.” | Continue reading
“There is almost nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.” | Continue reading
“There had never been such a quiet day before. It was the quietest day in the world.” | Continue reading
“We never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or she was himself or herself a lover.” | Continue reading
More than a century after Goethe's theoretical inquiry into the emotional hues of color, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907-July 13, 1954) contemplated the question from a far more intuitive place in a fragment from The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (public library ) - t … | Continue reading
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.” | Continue reading
"Finding the words is another step in learning to see," bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote in her lyrical love letter to moss. And so it is: Description and observation entwine in the consecrating act of paying attention - the act that swings open the gates of perception and al … | Continue reading