"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
A technicolor serenade to the variousness of this world. | Continue reading
“I am, in the deepest sense, an unhappy individual who since my earliest days have been nailed fast to some suffering close to insanity.” | Continue reading
“A storm always awakens whatever passion there is in me. I become eager, and seek relief in work.” | Continue reading
"I think if I could subsist on you... I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never he feverish or despondent... I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmths and contentment around." | Continue reading
On that singular moment at the end of life when all creative energy is concentrated and consecrated. | Continue reading
“I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.” | Continue reading
"Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place." | Continue reading
“One must face the despicable vanity which is at the root of all this niggling and haggling.” | Continue reading
"We are ourselves creating our own successors... We are daily giving them... that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race." | Continue reading
“It is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.” | Continue reading
A fluid serenade to this blue world, with a side of Rebecca Solnit. | Continue reading
"People ask: 'Would you or would you not like to be young again?' Of course, it is really one of those foolish questions that never should be asked, because they are impossible... You cannot unroll that snowball which is you: there is no 'you' except your life — lived." | Continue reading
“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.” | Continue reading
“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.” | Continue reading
“A relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.” | Continue reading
“Astronomy has enlarged the sphere of our conceptions, and opened to us a universe without bounds, where the human Imagination is lost.” | Continue reading
Composer, writer, artist, and Zen Buddhist John Cage (September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992) pioneered the aesthetics of silence, but he was animated by a clamorous inner life. When he was twenty-two, while dating another young man, Cage met artist Xenia Kashevaroff - the Alaskan-bor … | Continue reading
This might be the most transcendent capacity of consciousness, and the most terrifying: that in the world of the mind, we can construct models of the real world built upon theories of exquisite internal consistency; that those theories can have zero external validity when tested … | Continue reading
“…only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.” | Continue reading
How humanity turned another species into its first specie. | Continue reading
For all the hopeful creatures. | Continue reading
“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds… may then with the fair white wings of Imagination hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.&… | Continue reading
A humming serenade to the “awareness of awareness” from which our creative restlessness springs. | Continue reading
"One who has dared to be gloriously good and gloriously bad in one life. No Limbo for her. Rather let life itself grow living monuments out of trees and living words so that death can never take from our half-lives this radiant living that was lived among us." | 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
“Do unshed tears wait in little lakes?” | Continue reading
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.” | Continue reading
On the value of remaining resolutely what you are. | Continue reading