“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence.” | Continue reading
This is the second of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
“My conscience of life and eternity is not a mistake, or a loneliness, or a foolishness — but a warm dear love of our pour predicament.” | Continue reading
"Whoever has learned how to listen to trees," Hermann Hesse (July 2, 1877-August 9, 1962) wrote in what remains one of humanity's most beautiful love letters to trees, "no longer wants to be a tree. He* wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness."(them … | Continue reading
“For seeing the sea it’s sometimes better to close one’s eyes.” | Continue reading
"Our everyday experience does not prepare us to assimilate the gaping hugeness of the Grand Canyon or the crashing grandeur of Niagara Falls. We have no response at the ready; our usual frames of reference don’t fit." | Continue reading
“Legends… are bits of fact, or guesses at fact, pressed into the form of a story and flung out into the world as markers of how much ground has been travelled.” | Continue reading
“The beauty of a flower… may serve to awaken an interest in nature, which shall not sleep again.” | Continue reading
“That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego.” | Continue reading
"As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state." | Continue reading
“Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning.̶… | Continue reading
On change, the measure of intelligence, the courage to take responsibility for our own lives. | Continue reading
"Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you... until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that." | Continue reading
“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.” | Continue reading
An illustrated love letter to our Pale Blue Dot by humanity’s most innocent scale models of the universe. | Continue reading
“The Eye altering alters all.” | Continue reading
"It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us." | Continue reading
A ten-year-old boy on the side of a Lebanese mountain road, three generations of monarch butterflies, and the history of the future. | Continue reading
A teenage girl from another epoch illuminates the fault lines of ours. | Continue reading
A lively new look at one of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time. | Continue reading
A pastiche poem of tribute to the past and resolve for the possible. | Continue reading
“The human being isolates itself from the supplies of Providence for the happiness and renovation of life, unless those ties which connect it with others are formed.” | Continue reading
“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?” | Continue reading
Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds. | Continue reading
How a poem made a life and a life a poem. | Continue reading
“There is nothing in nature that can’t be taken as a sign of both mortality and invigoration… Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.” | Continue reading
The consolation of clouds, the secret lives of leaves, and the yearning to be more fully human. | Continue reading
"There is no way of telling whether we are living organisms in a positive universe, or pseudo-living organisms in a negative universe.. The difference is really one merely between the two directions of time, and, though those two directions are opposite to each other, they have n … | Continue reading
"It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing... or, rather, it meant everything... and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning... like an earful of Bach or an eyeful of Cézanne." | Continue reading
“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…” | Continue reading
In search of the most transcendent solution to “the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.” | Continue reading
An improbable celebration of the three most interesting things in life, the things that make it worth living: nature, human nature, and their cross-pollination in music. | Continue reading
The poetry of perspective, in unimagined shades of blue. | Continue reading
“Suppose someone standing by a clear, sweet spring were to curse it: it just keeps right on bringing drinkable water bubbling up to the surface.” | Continue reading
"We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union... We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed." | Continue reading
Roses are blue, violets are ultraviolet, and beauty is made of chemistry and light. | Continue reading
“The light of the mind must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world… To see, to hear, to be human requires… our ceaseless participation.” | Continue reading
“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.” | Continue reading
“Nothing beats kindness… It sits quietly beyond all things.” | Continue reading
"Grief is a heart-wrenchingly painful problem for the brain to solve, and grieving necessitates learning to live in the world with the absence of someone you love deeply, who is ingrained in your understanding of the world... For the brain, your loved one is simultaneously gone a … | Continue reading
Sound, color, and wonderment where the body meets the soul. | Continue reading
“Children help us to mediate between the ideal and the real.” | Continue reading
“People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body, too.” | Continue reading
An eighteen-year-old prodigy’s song of praise for the eternal consolation of trees. | Continue reading
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible. | Continue reading
"Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course they took God with them." | Continue reading
Love, laundry, and the miraculous in the mundane. | Continue reading
“A history of exercise is not really — or certainly not only — a history of the body. It is, equally, perhaps even primarily, a history of the mind.” | Continue reading