For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger

How to keep your soul from leaving you. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Light That Bridges the Dark Expanse Between Lonelinesses: James Baldwin on How Long-Distance Love Illuminates the Power of All Love

“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Highlights in Hindsight: Favorite Books of the Past Year

Trees, hummingbirds, snails, Stoicism, storytelling, Orwell’s roses, the crucible of consciousness, the end of the universe, and more trees. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Teenage Artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s Hauntingly Beautiful Century-Old Dreamscapes for French Fairy Tales

A forgotten visionary of rare talent and solemn tenderness. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany

“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Sonic Hieroglyphics and Acoustic X-Ray Vision: The Fascinating Science of Dolphins, Whales, and Our Pale Blue Dot’s Most Alien Communication Language

How Victorian astronomy helped decode the secret language of the seas. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Nick Cave on Creativity, the Myth of Originality, and How to Find Your Voice

“Your imagination… is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence… a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Antidote to Melancholy: Robert Burton’s Centuries-Old Salve for Depression, Epochs Ahead of Science

“Whosoever… is overrun with solitariness, or carried away with pleasing melancholy and vain conceits… or crucified with worldly care, I can prescribe him no better remedy thanR… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

What Is Love? A Tender and Poetic Illustrated Celebration of the Elemental Human Quest

A posy of subtle illumination from the garden of life. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Into the Submarine Fairyland: How Scientific Artist Else Bostelmann Invited the Terrestrial Imagination into the Wonder-World of the Deep Sea

“Nothing in the upper world can compare with the luxury of this nether realm of the sea, with its colors, its atmosphere of mystery, of poise, and tranquility.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

What Happens When We Die

“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities

“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Let Them Not Say: Krista Tippett Reads Jane Hirshfield’s Prayerful Poem of Promise to the Future

“Let them not say: we did not see it. We saw.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Almost Nothing, yet Everything: A Stunning Japanese Illustrated Poem Celebrating Water and the Wonder of Life

“It has no shape but can take any shape… You can touch it, but you cannot hold it… It can slip through your fingers, like it’s nothing at all. But life would be unthinkable … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past

Life-tested wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Secret to Superhuman Strength: An Illustrated Meditation on the Life of the Body, the Death of the Self, and Our Search for Meaning

“Also: This is it.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Of Trees, Solitude, Love, Loss, and the Stubborn Symphony of Aliveness: The Best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian 2021

From the Stoics to the snails, by way of music, matter, and the mind. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Jane Goodall on the Meaning of Wisdom and the Deepest Wellspring of Hope

“A great deal of our onslaught on Mother Nature is not really lack of intelligence but a lack of compassion… True wisdom requires both thinking with our head and understanding with our … | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Unselfing into Oneness with the All: Transcendentalist Queen Margaret Fuller on Transcendence

“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

I Feel, Therefore I Am: Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio on Consciousness and How the Feeling-Tone of the Body Underscores the Symphony of the Mind

“Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Against the Trap of Efficiency: Mortality, Meaning, and the Antidote to the Time-Anxiety that Syphons the Joy of Life

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster… Since finitude defines our lives… livi… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Loveliest Children’s Books of 2021

From the river to the Milky Way, by way of trees, geese, and unsung heroes. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Before I Grew Up: A Stunning Illustrated Elegy of Life, Loss, Our Search for Light, and Loneliness as a Crucible of Creativity

An uncommonly original and tenderhearted celebration of how an artist becomes an artist. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Dreams, Consciousness, and the Nature of the Universe

“Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity

“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

How Carl Jung and Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli Bridged Mind and Matter

Two of humanity’s greatest minds explore the parallels between spacetime and psyche, the atomic nucleus and the self. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Orwell’s Roses: Rebecca Solnit on How Nature Sustains Us, Beauty as Fuel for Change, and the Value of the Meaningless Things That Give Our Lives Meaning

“What is it that makes it possible to do the work that is of highest value to others and one’s central purpose in life? It may appear — to others, sometimes even to oneself — trivial, irrelev… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Carl Jung on How to Live

“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Scar: A Tender Illustrated French Meditation on Loss and Healing

Uncommon consolation from the body to the soul. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Restrings the Brain

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Winter Trees as a Portal to Aliveness

“Eons must have lapsed before the human eye grew keen enough and the human soul large enough to give sympathetic comprehension to the beauty of bare branches laced across changing skies.̶… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics Pioneer Norbert Wiener

“We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Darwin’s Greatest Regret and His Deathbed Reflection on What Makes Life Worth Living

“If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Love and Limerence: How Psychologist Dorothy Tennov Revolutionized Attachment Theory with Her Revelatory Research into the Confusions of Loving

“It may not be in contemplation of outer space that the greatest discoveries and explorations of the coming centuries will occur, but in our finally deciding to heed the dictum of self-unders… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 2 years ago

Trailblazing Composer Julia Perry on Music as the Universal Language of Love and Mutual Understanding

“Music has a unifying effect on the peoples of the world, because they all understand and love it… And when they find themselves enjoying and loving the same music, they find themselves… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Life, Death, and What Fills the Interlude with Meaning: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Touching Diary Reflections on His Dying Mother and His Five-Year-Old Daughter

“I saw my little Una… so full of spirit and life that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying mother, and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing in… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Shifting the Silence to Find the Meaning: 95-Year-Old Artist, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on How to Live and How to Die

“The universe makes a sound — is a sound. In the core of this sound there’s a silence, a silence that creates that sound, which is not its opposite, but its inseparable soul… Silence is… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Women in Trees: Sweet and Subversive Vintage Photographs of Defiant Delight

The chance-anthropology of a secret tribe. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

“Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only we aware of a fraction of what’s inside us from moment to moment.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Gravity, Grace, and What Binds Us: Poet Jane Hirshfield’s Timeless Hymn to Love and the Proud Scars of the Heart

“…and when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud…” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

The Geometry of Grief: Mathematician Michael Frame on How Fractals Help Fathom and Move Through Loss

“The distance between here and there is the answer to the wrong question.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Drawing a Tree: A Vintage Italian Meditation on the Existential Poetics of Diversity and Resilience Through the Art and Science of Trees

A subtle sylvan celebration of how our hurts and our healings shape the singular beauty of our character. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality

“Potentially, every tree is immortal.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living

How our cosmic improbability confers dignity and meaning upon our shared existence. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

What Makes You You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of Consciousness

“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

The Woman Who Saved the Hawks: Redeeming an Overlooked Pioneer of Conservation

The story of the countercultural courage and persistence that shaped the modern ecological conscience. | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Make Meatballs Sing: A Loving Illustrated Celebration of the Radical Nun, Artist, Teacher, and Activist Corita Kent

“Doing and making are acts of hope, and as that hope grows we stop feeling overwhelmed by the troubles of the world. We remember that we — as individuals and groups — can do something about t… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago

Halloween’s Forbidden Fruit: Michael Pollan on Gardening as Radicalism and the Scandalous Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends

“For most of their history… gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for il… | Continue reading


@themarginalian.org | 3 years ago