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Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World
We forget that none of this had to exist — that we weren’t owed mountains and music by the universe. And maybe we have to forget — or we would be too stupefied with gratitude for every raindrop and...
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How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely...
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Favorite Books of the Year: Art, Science, Poetry, Psychology, Children’s, and...
Because I read for the same reason I write — to fathom my life and deepen my living — looking back on a year of life has always been looking back on a year of reading. This year was different — a time...
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How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the...
Because life is a cosmos of connection, because to be alive is to be in relationship with the world, because (in the immortal words of John Muir) “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it...
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A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox...
“A persona is a portal we are not aware of passing through,” my beloved editor Dan Frank wrote in an unpublished poem shortly before the insentient atoms that composed him, this singular and...
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Birds, Loves, and Obscure Sorrows: The Best of The Marginalian 2024
Hindsight is how we connect the dots that figure our lives. To look back on even a single year is to see clearly the contour of who we are in its points of attention and priority. “How we spend our...
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The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration
Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses...
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The Promethean Power of Burnout
“Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way. Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment...
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Some Blessings to Begin with
It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of...
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Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing
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...
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Don’t Waste Your Greening Life-Force: Hildegard’s Prophetic Enchanted Ecology
The year is 1174. Gravity, oxygen, and electricity have not been discovered. Clocks, calculus, and the printing press have not been invented. Earth is the center of the universe, encircled by heavenly...
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The Hot Shower as Uncommon Prayer
One of the paradoxes of being alive is that it is often through the extremes of sensation, through the shock of having a body, that we come most proximate to the subtleties of the soul. Walt Whitman...
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Do Not Spare Yourself
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and...
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The Countercultural Sanity of the Irrational: Pioneering Psychiatrist Otto...
In one crucial respect at least, the human animal does not pass the mirror test of self-knowledge: We move through the world by impulse and emotion, then look back and rationalize our choices,...
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The Light in the Abyss Between Us
Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you. I remember the moment a friend’s son came home from school to recount with something between shock and exhilaration how he...
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On Love: Saint Paul and the Egret
Among the myriad things that didn’t have to exist — music, minds, the meadow lark — none is more symphonic, more defiant of logic, more capable of winging existence with life than love. Biologically,...
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How to Make America Great: A Visionary Manifesto from the Woman Who Ran for...
In 1872, half a century before American women could vote, Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838–June 9, 1927) ran for President, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate. Papers declared her...
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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...
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Change, Presence, and the Imperative of Self-Renewal: Existential Lessons...
“No man is an island,” John Donne wrote in his timeless ode to our shared human experience. And yet each of us is a chance event islanded in time; in each of us there is an island of solitude so...
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On Consolation: Notes on Our Search for Meaning and the Antidote to Resignation
The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never unhappen it. Even forgiveness, for all its elemental power, can never bend the arrow of time, can only ever salve the hole it makes in the...
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