Of Trees, Solitude, Love, Loss, and the Stubborn Symphony of Aliveness: The Best of Brain Pickings / The Marginalian 2021

From the Stoics to the snails, by way of music, matter, and the mind.

It is an annual ritual to glance over time’s shoulder each year and reflect on what has made it most livable and worthy of living through my writing — always the clearest mirror of what irradiated and perturbed my heart and mind as our uncommon planet made its steady revolution around its common star.

Inevitably, patterns emerge that were not obvious in the moment-by-moment experience. Inevitably, those patterns reveal that ...