Maria Popova's Blog, page 12

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 loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly colliding with reality, with the indifference of time and chance, with the opposing hopes and longings of others.

We have, of course, always invented institutions of salvation — religion to save us from our sins, therapy to ...

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 knew this: “If the body is not the soul,” he sang electric, “what is the soul?” William James knew it: “A purely disembodied emotion is a nonentity,” he wrote in his pioneering theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. You and I know it, perhaps know it daily: Few things ensoul us more readily th...

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 bodies whose motions are ministered by angels.

Most people never live past their thirties.

Medicine abides by the Greek theory of the humors and treats all ailments with a combination of bloodletting, herbal tinctures, amputation, and the King’s Touch.

No university will educate a woman. In f...

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 look at a lichen is a devotional act. We bless our own lives by recognizing and reverencing the details, the miniature marvels that make this improbable world what it is. And yet consciousness evolved to filter them out, to blur them into more abstract pictures we can parse, to sieves relevance fro...

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 consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever broadening hearts.

Wood thrush divination from An Alma...

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 of our transformation.”

In every creative life, in every life of passion and purpose, there comes a time when the animating spark grows dim and the muscle of motivation slackens, when you come to feel benumbed to beauty and abandoned by your numen, suffocating in the exhaust fume of your own exerti...

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 days,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is how we spend our lives.” How we spend our minds is our primary purchase on our days.

In the annual hindsight ritual of distilling the “best” of The Marginalian, here is a Venn diagram of the most read pieces and those I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincid...

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 into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.

In such times, the most courageous thing ...

A Whole of Parts: Philosopher R.L. Nettleship on Love, Death, and the Paradox of Personality

“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 unrepeatable person, disbanded to return to the universe. And yet despite everything we know about what happens to those atoms when we die, the question of how they cohered into a person — the question of what makes a person, of how the myriad personae within constellate the total personality that moves thro...

How You Relate to Anything Is How You Relate to Everything: Reclaiming the Spirit of the Christmas Tree

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 hitched to everything else in the universe,” how we relate to anything is how we relate to everything. There is always a choice in the way we orient to any object of attention — a person, a practice, a song, a stone: the choice to consecrate or commodify the object, to routinize or ritualize the r...