Maria Popova's Blog, page 21

Is Your Life a Fairy Tale, a Novel, or a Poem?

When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form of madness; or we assume ourselves sane and accuse the external — the other person, the situation, the world — of madness. Both are stories we tell ourselves about what is true, how things are, and how things should be. ...

Are You Living a Fairy Tale, a Novel, or a Poem?

When reality fissures along the fault line of our expectations and the unwelcome happens — a death, an abandonment, a promise broken, a kindness withheld — we tend to cope in one of two ways: We question our own sanity, assuming the outside world coherent and our response a form of madness; or we assume ourselves sane and accuse the external — the other person, the situation, the world — of madness. Both are stories we tell ourselves about what is true, how things are, and how things should be. ...

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives.

We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of our lives, and in such times another reflex is the longing for an authority figure selling certainty, claiming the fist to be a helping hand. It is a touchingly human impulse, primal and pacifying — children turn to the parent to remove the...

200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness

There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”

Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitud...

An Illustrated Field Guide to the Science and Wonder of the Clouds

Clouds drift ephemeral across the dome of this world, carrying eternity — condensing molecules that animated the first breath of life, coursing with electric charges that will power the last thought.

To me, a cloud will always be a spell against indifference — a little bloom of wonder to remind us that everything changes yet everything holds.

Two centuries after the amateur meteorologist Luke Howard classified the clouds with Goethe’s aid and two generations after Rachel Carson composed her ly...

Poetry as Prayer: The Great Russian Poet Marina Tsvetaeva on Reclaiming the Divine

“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.”

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.

The great Russian poet ...

The Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Love and the Meaning of Respect

“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”

“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote as he charted the art of interbeing. Few things wound more deeply and syphon love more swiftly than the feeling of not being fully seen, of being exiled from your own totality by a simulacrum of love that showers ad...

Let the Last Thing Be Song

“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.”

A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert matter gets to a miracle. At its most miraculous, life has a musical quality, harmonious and symphonic with meaning. The word person itself takes its root from the Latin for “to sound through.”

And Pipe the Little Songs that Are Inside of Bubbles by Dugald Stewart...

What Birds Dream About: The Evolution of REM and How We Practice the Possible in Our Sleep

“It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real… It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.”

This essay originally appeared in The New York Times

I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust...

The Sunflower and the Soul: Wendell Berry on the Collaborative Nature of the Universe and the Cure for Conflict

“We are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which we are collaborating with God and nature in the making of ourselves and one another.”

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Walt Whitman wrote an epoch before the Nobel-winning physicis...