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The Messiah in the Mountain: Darwin on Wonder and the Spirituality of Nature

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/19/darwin-messiah/

Published: May 19, 2024 16:25

Here we are, matter yearning for meaning, each of us a fragile constellation of chemistry and chance hurtling through a cold cosmos that has no accord for our wishes, takes no interest in our dreams. “I can’t but believe that all that majesty and all that…

On Giving Up: Adam Phillips on Knowing What You Want, the Art of Self-Revision, and the Courage to Change Your Mind

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/17/adam-phillips-giving-up/

Published: May 17, 2024 16:24

"Not being able to give up is not to be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time, and the revisions it brings."

John Gardner on the Key to Self-Renewal Across Life and the Art of Making Rather Than Finding Meaning

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/15/gardner-self-renewal-meaning/

Published: May 15, 2024 23:22

"The potentialities you develop to the full come as the result of an interplay between you and life's challenges."

Nothing: The Illustrated Story of How John Cage Revolutionized Music Through Silence

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/13/nothing-john-cage-day-raschka/

Published: May 13, 2024 16:30

"We make our lives by what we love."

What It’s Like to Be a Falcon: The Peregrine as a Portal to a Way of Seeing and a State of Being

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/09/baker-peregrine/

Published: May 10, 2024 00:59

"You cannot know what freedom means till you have seen a peregrine loosed into the warm spring sky to roam at will through all the far provinces of light."

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/08/tucker-nichols-flowers/

Published: May 8, 2024 14:33

“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage herbarium until the moment Susan pinned a violet to her alabaster chest in the casket, she filled her poems…

Nature’s Oldest Mandolin: The Poetic Science of How Cicadas Sing

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/05/cicadas/

Published: May 5, 2024 17:41

“The use of music,” Richard Powers wrote, “is to remind us how short a time we have a body” — a truth nowhere more bittersweet than in the creature whose body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its…

The Work of Art: Inside the Creative Process of Beloved Artists, Poets, Musicians, and Other Makes of Meaning

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/01/the-work-of-art-adam-moss/

Published: May 1, 2024 12:12

“The true artist,” Beethoven wrote in his touching letter of advice to a young girl aspiring to be an artist, “is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.” The choreographer Martha Graham called…

The Universe in Verse Book

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/05/01/the-universe-in-verse-book/

Published: May 1, 2024 12:11

"We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of…

The Wild Iris: Louise Glück on the Door at the End of Your Suffering

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/29/louse-gluck-wild-iris/

Published: April 29, 2024 21:17

"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."

The Paradise Notebooks: A Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/26/paradise-notebooks/

Published: April 26, 2024 17:26

"Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to…