Maria Popova's Blog, page 16

The Galapagos and the Meaning of Life: A Young Woman’s Bittersweet Experiment in Inner Freedom

“We may think we are domesticated but we are not,” Jay Griffiths wrote in her homily on not wasting our wildness, insisting on the “primal allegiance” the human spirit has to the wild.

A decade after artist Rockwell Kent headed to a remote Alaskan island “to stand face to face with that infinite and unfathomable thing which is the wilderness,” a young German woman headed to an even smaller island on the opposite side of the globe to face a wilderness even more fierce and fathomless, living out h...

Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent

The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best ...

Everything Is Happening All the Time: Legendary Physicist John Archibald Wheeler on Death and the Life-Force

“To die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier,” Walt Whitman writes in the prime of life.

“What happens when you get to the end of things?” four-year-old Johnny in Ohio asks his mother from the bathtub while Whitman’s borrowed atoms are becoming young grass in a New Jersey cemetery.

In his lifetime of nearly a century, John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911–April 13, 2008) would go on revolutionize physics by posing this question to reality itself, emerging as a bridge figure betw...

Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship

People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they change us all the same.

The great consolation of the cosmic order is the constancy of its laws, indiscriminate across the immensity of space, unchanged since the beginning of time. That we can predict an eclipse centuries into the future with precision down to the second but not the outcome of an...

The Unphotographable: Richard Adams on the Singular Magic of Autumn

There is a lovely liminality to autumn — this threshold time between the centripetal exuberance of summer and the season for tending to the inner garden, as Rilke wrote of winter. Autumn is a living metaphor for the necessary losses that shape our human lives: What falls away reveals the imperative beneath the superfluous, making what remains all the more precious — the fleeting colors, the fading light, the embering warmth. It is a teacher in the art of letting go — what has ceased to nourish, ...

Don’t Waste Your Wildness

“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth.”

Once, while writing my first book, I lived on a lush volcanic island balding with so-called civilization, lawnmowers muffling its birdsong to turn its jungles into golf courses.

I watched waves taller t...

Octavia Butler (and Whitman’s Ghost) on America

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought,” Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) urged in her prophetic Parable of the Talents, written in the 1990s and set in the 2020s. Her words remain a haunting reminder that our rights are founded upon our responsibilities: “To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.” There are few terrors greater than the knowledge that we are free to ...

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychological Development: The 8 Inner Conflicts That Shape Who We Are

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychological Development: The 8 Basic Inner Conflicts That Shape Who We Are

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...

Erik Erikson’s Stages of Human Development: The 8 Basic Conflicts That Shape Who We Are

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you — into this temporary clump of borrowed stardust that, for the brief interlude between not having existed and no longer existing, gets to have ideas and ice cream and orgasms, gets to yearn and to suffer and to love.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing about being alive is that we are never finished and compl...