Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love
"Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."
LifeCulture
The Marginalian.
Maria Popova exploring literature, philosophy, art, and the search for meaning.
Recent essays
30 of 227How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states, we yearn for a firm…
How Not to 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…
Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson’s Tender and Passionate Letters to the Love of Her Life
"I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves... I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom."
The True Purpose of Tarot
“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that life has violated her predictions about what is possible, imme…
How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Vulnerabilities of Being Human
"It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human."
Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding
"Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed."
How to Reconcile Your Most Painful Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference Between Regret and Remorse
You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the next moment, too — the desperate wish for an undo button y…
How Two Souls Can Interact with One Another: Simone de Beauvoir on Love and Friendship
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual…
The Most Important Thing to Remember About Your Mother
"It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger."
How to Handle Provocation: Bertrand Russell’s Remarkable Response to a Fascist
"The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us."
The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
"You’ll long for me when I’m gone... You'll kiss the headstone of my grave... Kiss my face instead!"
The Power of Being a Threshold Person: Liminality, Communitas, and the Anti-structures of Possibility
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rat…
Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your Intuitions
"This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it."
Wendell Berry on Solitude and the Two Great Enemies of Creative Work
"True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible... In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives."
The Creative Power of Uncertainty: Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
"Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous ‘I don't know.’"
Italo Calvino on Reading and Sex
"Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies... differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear... What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and sp…
The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity
“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales,” Einstein reportedly told one mother who wished for her son to become a scientist. “If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Given that the deepest measure of int…
Wendell Berry on Hope, Despair, and the Measure of Effective Protest
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair…
How to Have Enough: Wendell Berry on Creativity and Love
“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have eno…
The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
"If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world."
The Thing Itself: C.S. Lewis on What We Long for in Our Existential Longing
"...only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited."
Joan Didion on Letting Go
“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving…
The 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship
"The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible."
How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come... We live everything as it comes, without warning."
A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How a Forgotten Medieval Woman Gave Groups of Birds Their Strange Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith
Language is an instrument of great precision and poignancy — our best tool for telling each other what the world is and what we are, for conveying the blueness of blue and the wonder of being alive. But it is also a thing of great pliancy and creativity — a li…
The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back."
The Bird in You, the World in You, and the Art of Trusting Time: Ceramics, Serpentine, and How to Get Over Heartbreak
One December afternoon, I arrived in Patagonia with a big blue backpack, a small bilingual edition of Pablo Neruda’s love poems, and a broken heart. (Though a heart, of course, never breaks.) The moment I stepped out of the airplane, the Andes towered over me…
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
"Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged."