"Experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are and what the world we live in is."
"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/12/dictionary-of-obscure-sorrows/
"We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos."
"If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/04/03/william-james-on-love/
"A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent."
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing th...
"At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears...
"Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/03/03/the-middle-passage-john-hollis/
"While we weaken friendships by expecting too little of them, we undermine romantic relationships by expecting too much of them."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/02/28/the-other-significant-others/
"Emotions are not reactions to the world; they are your constructions of the world."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/02/23/how-emotions-are-made/
"Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair."
"All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/02/11/anne-morrow-lindbergh-change/
There is a thought experiment known as Mary’s Room, brilliant and haunting, about the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it, about the nature of knowledge, the mystery of co...
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to his young correspondent. The...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/02/03/thich-nhat-hanh-love-rivers/
"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/26/when-women-were-birds/
"No guarantees in this life."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/21/william-stafford-yes/
The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I awoke to terrifying flashbacks of my childhood under a totalitarian dictatorship. Desperate for assurance that the future need not hold the tot...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/18/sophie-de-grouchys-sympathy/
How beautiful and unbearable that only one of each exists — each lover, each child, each dog; that this particular chance-constellation of atoms has never before existed and will never again re...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/13/mark-doty-sentimentality/
"Like a precious, fleeting foam over the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his happines...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/01/07/hermann-hesse-steppenwolf-artist/
"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/12/30/john-odonohue-blessings-beginnings/