Maria Popova's Blog, page 19

You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective

“The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.”

In her stunning space-bound ode to the human condition inspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, ...

Honing Life on the Edges of the Possible: Geologist Turned Psychoanalyst Ruth Allen on Boundaries and Limits as Frontiers of Transformation and Growth

“At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Rupture precedes revolution.”

It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know our depths and our limits, to know where we end and the rest of the world begins. And it is often at the edges, those boundary regions between one state of being and another, that we fathom ourselves, that we grow most alive — after al...

Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

“A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.”

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”

It is a powerful s...

Turning to Stone: A Geologist’s Love Letter to the Wisdom of Rocks

Among the great salvations of my childhood were the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our next door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water. I spent long hours casting amethyst refractions on the ceiling, carving words into the cutting board with a shard of obsidian, seeing alien oceans and clouds in an orb of agate, feeling in my small bones the almost unbearable beauty of this world and the size of time. I hadn’t been alive a decade, and I ...

How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or by circumstance — is a singularly discomposing experience. It takes a tremendous effort of the psyche to keep oneself from feeling abandoned, and we know from fMRI studies that every abandonment is experienced as a mini...

The Art of Withstanding Abandonment: The Patience of the Penguin and How Evolution Invented Faith

“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in silence, by choice or by circumstance — is a singularly discomposing experience. It takes a tremendous effort of the psyche to keep oneself from feeling abandoned, and we know from fMRI studies that every abandonment is experienced as a mini...

We Go to the Park: A Soulful Illustrated Meditation on Our Search for Meaning

“Sometimes it feels as if all of life is made up of longing.”

My first great culture shock upon arriving in America was that concrete playgrounds, basketball courts, and tiny triangles of grass between busy streets all bore plaques that called them “parks.” Where I came from, a park was a place of birdsong and rustling leaves, a place to ramble, to get lost in, to dream in; a patch of wonder in the middle of the city; a pocket wilderness. It was in a park that I took my first steps, had my firs...

Batter My Heart: Love, the Divine Within, and How Not to Break Your Own Heart

There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because all love is a yearning for the sacred, within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being.

The Heart o...

Batter My Heart: Love, the Divine Within, and How Not to Break Our Your Own Heart

There are many things we mistake for love — infatuation, admiration, need — but there is no error of the heart graver than making another our higher power. This may seem inevitable — because to love is always to see the divine in each other, because all love is a yearning for the sacred, within us and between us. And yet the moment we cast the other as our savior, our redeemer, the arbiter of our significance, we have ceased loving — for we have ceased seeing the living human being.

The Heart o...

Of Stars, Seagulls, and Love: Loren Eiseley on the First and Final Truth of Life

Somewhere along the way of life, we learn that love means very different things to different people, and yet all personal love is but a fractal of a larger universal love. Some call it God. I call it wonder. Dante called it “the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.”

Because the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness and consciousness the crowning achievement of the universe, because the mystery of the universe will always exceed the reach of the consciousness...