200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Gardening

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Biking Through Time: Brooklyn Youth Chorus Sings Composer Paola Prestini’s Anthem for Women’s Freedom of Body and Mind

A two-wheel romp through the topography of progress from Victorian times to rural Spain to twentieth-century America. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Finn’s Feather: A Tender Illustrated Meditation on Rediscovering the Joy of Aliveness on the Other Side of Loss

Because grief, too, is a thing with feathers. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Ever-Present Origin: Swiss Poet, Philosopher, and Linguist Jean Gebser’s Prescient 1949 Vision for the Evolution of Consciousness

"Origin is ever-present. It is not a beginning, since all beginning is linked with time... not just the 'now'... or a unit of time. It is ever-originating, an achievement of full integration and continuous renewal." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Kosmos: Artist Dustin Yellin Reads Walt Whitman’s Timeless Hymn to Human Nature as a Miniature of the Universe

A song of praise for that place in us housing “the past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Hermann Hesse on Little Joys (2017)

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Fixed vs. Growth: The Two Basic Mindsets That Shape Our Lives

How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

You Are a Wonder, You Are a Nobody, You Are an Ever-Drifting Ship: Melville on the Mystery of What Makes Us Who We Are

“There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause… We trace the round again; and are… Ifs eternally.R… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Emily Dickinson’s Botanical Inspiration: Stunning 19th-Century Flower Paintings by the Forgotten Artist and Poet Clarissa Munger Badger

A vibrant celebration of flowers as “brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues,” as “stars… wherein we read our history.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Atoms with Consciousness: Yo-Yo Ma Performs Richard Feynman’s Ode to the Wonder of Life, Animated

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How to Change a World: The Radical Russian Prince Turned Anarchist and Pioneering Scientist Peter Kropotkin’s Advice to the Talented Young

“Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Octopus Empire: An Animated Poem

A playful and poignant what-if for the planet. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

We Are Made of Music, We Are Made of Time: Violinist Natalie Hodges on the Poetic Science of Sound and Feeling

“Time renders most individual moments meaningless… but it is only through the passage of time that life acquires its meaning. And that meaning itself is constantly in flux.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran

In the final years of his long life, which encompassed world wars and assassinations and numerous terrors, the great cellist and human rights advocate Pablo Casals urged humanity to "make this world worthy of its children."(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Illustrations from Elizabeth Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Medicinal Plants

Time-travel to the dawn of modern medical science via the stunning art of a self-taught woman illustrator and botanist. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The More Loving One: The Science of Entropy and the Art of Alternative Endings

“If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How to Face the Centuries with Confidence: The Mystery of the World’s Most Majestic Tree

“The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Hope, Love, and the Remedy for Despair, from Gabriel Marcel to Nick Cave

“To love anybody is to expect something from him, something which can neither be defined nor foreseen; it is at the same time in someway to make it possible for him to fulfill this expectatio… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy

“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Against the Gods: Iris Murdoch on Truth, the Meaning of Goodness, and How Attention Unmasks the Universe

"When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Margaret Wise Brown and the Puzzle of What Makes a Thing Itself (or You Yourself)

Aristotle, Alice, and a back flap. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Dirge Without Music: Emmy Noether, Symmetry, and the Conservation of Energy (Amanda Palmer Reads Edna St. Vincent Millay, Animated by Sophie Blackall)

“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

We Can Be Different: David Byrne’s Illustrated History of the Future

“The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Magpie in the Mind: The Emerging Science of Thinking with the Whole World Beyond the Brain

"By reaching beyond the brain... we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Wonder, Hungry Wolves, and the Whimsy of Resilience: Arthur Rackham’s Haunting 1920 Illustrations for Irish Fairy Tales

A lyrical reminder that our terror and our tenderness spring from the same source. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How Aubrey Beardsley's Visionary Illustrations for Oscar Wilde's "Salome" Subverted Victorian Gender Norms and Revolutionized the Graphic Arts

In his short life, Aubrey Beardsley (August 21, 1872-March 16, 1898) became a pioneer of the Art Nouveau movement and forever changed the course of the graphic arts. He was an artist of elegant and unsentimental exaggeration, and yet beneath his grotesque aesthetic lay a subtle s … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Cosmic Consolation for Human Hardship: The Great Naturalist John Burroughs on How to Live with Life

"We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe... We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune. … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How to Fix a World: A Preschooler’s Poem About the End of Bullets and Sorrow, Animated by a Ukrainian Artist

A 90-second revelation in the heart, from humanity at its most purehearted. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All

"What an astonishing thing it is to find something. Children, who excel at it — chiefly because the world is still so new to them that they can’t help but notice it — understand this, and automatically delight in it." | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Are You an Echo: The Remarkable Story of the Forgotten Young Woman Who Became Japan's Most Beloved Children's Poet

In 1966, while leafing through an obscure book, a 19-year-old Japanese aspiring poet by the name of Setsuo Yazaki discovered a poem that stopped him up short with its staggering generosity of empathy and existential truth conferred with great simplicity: BIG CATCH At sunrise, glo … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Building Blocks of Peace: Pioneering X-Ray Crystallographer and Activist Kathleen Lonsdale’s Quiet Masterpiece on Moral Courage and Our Personal Power

“Those people who see clearly the necessity of changed thinking must themselves undertake the discipline of thinking in new ways and must persuade others to do so.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Singularity: An Animated Ode to Our Primeval Bond with Nature and Each Other (Toshi Reagon Sings Marissa Davis)

A song of praise for life and “the smallest possible once before once.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Backdoor to Immortality: Marguerite Duras on What Makes Life Worth Living in the Face of Death

“Immortality is not a matter of more or less time.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Fragile Species: A Scientist-Poet’s Forgotten Masterpiece of Perspective on How to Live with Our Humanity

“We need a better word than chance… To go all the way form a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical t… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us

The metaphysical made physical in a symphonic celebration of imagination, collaboration, and the human heart. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Let There Always Be Light: Dark Matter and the Mystery of Our Mortal Stardust (Patti Smith Reads Rebecca Elson)

“For this we go out dark nights, searching… for signs of unseen things… Let there be swarms of them, enough for immortality, always a star where we can warm ourselves.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity: Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness

“The over-all number of minds is just one.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Aloneness, Belonging, and the Paradox of Vulnerability, in Love and Creative Work

Wisdom on the elementary particles of the creative life and our shared humanity from Alain de Botton, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Alexander, and other visionaries of our time. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Flower and the Meaning of Life

A look into “the very heart of nature’s double nature.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Achieving Perspective: Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell and the Poetry of the Cosmic Perspective, with David Byrne

“Mingle the starlight with your lives, and you won’t be fretted by trifles.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

John Lennon on the Torture of Excellence and the Vital Role of Invisible Incubation in the Creative Process

“Every song I’ve ever written has been absolute torture… except for the ten or so songs the gods give you and that come out of nowhere.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

“These are the times in life — when nothing happens — but in quietness the soul expands.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

My God, It’s Full of Stars: An Animated Serenade to Hubble and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Saeculum of Time

“Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Alan Turing, Trees, and the Wonder of Life

“The more a creature’s life is worth, the less of it is alive.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology (Joan As Police Woman Sings Emily Dickinson)

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Animated Universe in Verse, Part 1: The Origin of Life and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Pattern, Perspective, and Trust: Barry Lopez on Storytelling

“It is through story… 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… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago