From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and transcendence. | Continue reading
A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life. | Continue reading
“There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.” | Continue reading
“To put your hands in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.” | Continue reading
“The poets cannot hear each other; they cannot see each other. They can only feel the other’s warmth.” | Continue reading
Shamans, neurochemistry, and the metabolic byproducts of wonder. | Continue reading
“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.” | Continue reading
“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that… is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction… There can be no separate literature of scienc… | Continue reading
“Over a hill, at the end of a road, by a glittering stream that twists and turns, stands a house…” | Continue reading
“Mind is invisible nature, while nature is visible mind.” | Continue reading
“Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am! It is his desire of sympathy that lies at the bottom of the great heap of his babblement.” | Continue reading
In the final years of a long life animated by optimism as a catalyst of democracy and the spring of action toward justice, Walt Whitman's aged baritone unspools from the only surviving recording of his voice to read a verse from one of his last poems, envisioning America as a "ce … | Continue reading
The Peanuts series by Charles M. Schulz (November 26, 1922-February 12, 2000) endures as one of the most beloved cartoons of all time, partly because of Schulz's gift for capturing the great, tender truths of human existence through remarkably simple, sometimes poetic, often humo … | Continue reading
"We love to contemplate blue," Goethe observed in his theory of color and emotion, "not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it." This particular color - or, rather, this universe of hues - seems to have drawn after it more minds than any other, inking the bod … | Continue reading
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896-December 21, 1940) - literary legend, master of the muse, deft hate mail responder, star of early book ads, and one wise dad - was also an unsuspected gourmand.(themarginalian.org) | Continue reading
Finding that vitalizing “a reciprocity between us perceiving the world together through art, and the world in turn reading us through what we make.” | Continue reading
“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” | Continue reading
“It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness.” | Continue reading
"Tenderness is the most modest form of love. It is the kind of love that does not appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one cites it... It appears wherever we take a close and careful look at another being, at something that is not our 'self.’" | Continue reading
"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