All articles from The Marginalian
Gardening and the Creative Spirit: 200 Years of Great Writers and Artists on the Rewards of Soil and Seed
Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.
The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul
"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."
Emerson on Talent vs. Character, Our Resistance to Change, and the Key to True Personal Growth
"People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."
How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust
"The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart."
Corrective for a Broken Heart
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great parad
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
"It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger."
The Bird in the Heart: Terry Tempest Williams on the Paradox of Transformation and How to Live with Uncertainty
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay."
How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."
Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise
"Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil."
How to Stop Doing and Start Living
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to
Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation
"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify
Bruce Springsteen on Surviving Depression and His Strategy for Living Through the Visitations of the Darkness
"If you can acknowledge it and you can relax with it a little bit, very often it shortens its duration."
Create Dangerously: Albert Camus on the Power of Art as Resistance and Creativity as an Instrument of Freedom
"To create today is to create dangerously... The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies...
The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
"If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world."
Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair
“If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his wartime manifesto for hope in difficult times, “he does not come to us from boo
Life, Loss, and the Wisdom of Rivers
"It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all."
The Music of Trees: Improvisation, Iteration, and the Science of Immortality
"Potentially, every tree is immortal."
Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are
"Often the places we grow up in... influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us."
The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back."
This Is a Poem That Heals Fish: An Almost Unbearably Wonderful Picture-Book About How Poetry Works Its Magic
"A poem ... is when you are in love and have the sky in your mouth."
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 be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment."
Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain
"Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."
Where Love Goes When It Goes
These passages appear on pages 126-127 of Traversal in the context of Mary Shelley’s life. Where does love go when it goes? It is a common question, contrived in its commonness yet savagely sincere, b
Reweaving the Rainbow: Divinations for Living from the Science of Life
I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Neither of u
Do the Next Right Thing: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of His Famous Tenet for Navigating Uncertainty
"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."
What Forgiveness Takes
Shortly after I began the year with some blessings, a friend sent me Lucille Clifton’s spare, splendid poem “blessing the boats.” We had met at a poetry workshop and shared a resolution to write more
The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
"Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought."
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing.
The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked."
How to Get Love Less Wrong: George Saunders on Breaking the Patterns that Break Our Hearts
"We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable..."
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: The Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
"What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on."
How to Be a Lichen: Adaptive Strategies for the Vulnerabilities of Being Human from Nature’s Tiny Titans of Tenacity
When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlan
How to Bear Your Loneliness
"We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness."
Roots and the Meaning of Life
They are so far out of sight for us, creatures of the upper world, that we don’t readily think of them. But as soon as we do, as soon as we plunge the mind into the cold dark humus to which the body w