The Stoics and snails: music, matter, 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.
There will always be patterns that are not apparent in our moment-to-moment experiences. Inevitably, those patterns reveal that however tumultuous the seasons of being might feel — and what a tempest of uncertainty and disorientation 2021 has been for all of us in the world, what a tempest of loss sudden as frostbite and slow-blooming rebirth for my personal world — the things that make life most luminous with aliveness are variations on eternal themes, impervious to our passing perturbations.
Here are the best of these eternal echoes — as usual, a composite best: a hybrid of the pieces I poured the most heart into writing and the pieces most widely read and shared by those whose hearts they touched.
We are grateful for your time.
We are grateful for your kindness.
* * *
Rilke: The Relationship between Solitude, Love and Creativity
It is available here.
* * *
Brain Pickings Revealed: 15 years later, Becoming the Marginalian
It is available here.
* * *
James Baldwin, Love, The Illusion of Choice & the Paradox of Freedom
It is available here.
* * *
The Snail With the Right Heart: True Science and Love Story
It is available here.
* * *
Music and the Neural Harmonics Of Emotion and How Love Restrings The Brain
It is available here.
* * *
Hannah Arendt discusses What Forgiveness Actually Means: The Antidote for the Reversibility of Life
It is available here.
* * *
The Ocean, the Meaning of Life
It is available here.
* * *
Richard Dawkins: The Luckiness of Death
It is available here.
* * *
Alan Lightman, Physics, discusses Probable Impossibilities.
It is available here.
* * *
The Pattern within the Pattern: Fractals. A Hidden Order beneath Chaos. and The Story of the Refugee That Revolutionized Mathematics of Reality.
It is available here.
* * *
Etel Adnan (95-Year-Old): How to live and how to die
It is available here.
* * *
The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color
It is available here.
* * *
Wintering: The Wisdom of Sadness and Resilience. How Science of Trees Illuminates Self-Renewal through Difficult Times
It is available here.
* * *
The Banality of Survival, Love and Loss: Charles Darwin’s Beloved Daughter and How to Find Meaning in Mortality
It is available here.
* * *
Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase’s Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s-1950s
It is available here.
* * *
Marcus Aurelius, Stoic Antidote To Frustration: Marcus Aurelius – How to Maintain Your Mental Composition and Emotional Equanimity when People Make You Feel Low
It is available here.
* * *
Growing through Grief: Derek Jarman discusses gardening as creative redemption, consecration of time, and training ground for Presence
It is available here.
* * *
David Whyte, poet and philosopher on The Truelove: Beyond Limiting Beliefs About the Things We Deserve
It is available here.
* * *
Trees, Whales, And Our Digital Future: George Dyson, on Nature, Human Nature, And The Relationship Between Our Minds & Our Machines
It is available here.
* * *
The Mystery of Aliveness and Music
It is available here.
* * *
Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Franz Marc, Artist, Wisdom of Animals and Fight of Beauty Against Brutality
It is available here.
* * *
Thich Nhat Hanh discusses the Art of Deep listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps for Repairing Relationships
It is available here.
* * *
Orwell’s Roses: Rebecca Solnit on How Nature Sustains Us, Beauty as Fuel for Change, and the Value of the Meaningless Things That Give Our Lives Meaning
It is available here.
* * *
When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
It is available here.
* * *
Stephen Batchelor, Buddhist Teacher and Scholar on the Art of Solitude: Contemplative Practices and Creativity
It is available here.
* * *
The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
It is available here.
Donating = Loving
Over the past decade, I spent hundreds of hours creating and spending many thousands each month. MarginalianIt was known for the infuriating name Brain Pickings its first 15 years. Thanks to the support of readers, it has been free from ads and still exists. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. Donations are a great way to make your life better. Every dollar counts.
Subscribe to our newsletter
MarginalianReceive a weekly free newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
