2026-03-27 23:26:24
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable.
And so, a poem.
CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART
by Maria PopovaWhy all the threadbare drama,
the stale catastrophism
of calling it broken?
It still beats,
doesn’t it,
still trembles at the sight
of fog flowing through the forest
like a slow dance song.
It was only
dislocated,
lost its locus
for a while,
popped out of the socket
of good sense.
There is no one
to pick up the pieces
because there are no pieces.
Only the firm, fastidious
hand of time
to slide it back
into place.And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.We are here
to lose our way.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-27 23:10:05
One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.
It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph to accept it not with bitterness but with love.
How to make that liberating shift of perspective is what the playwright, suffragist, and psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) considers in a passage from her 1968 autobiography The Measure of My Days (public library).
She writes:
A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.
In a sentiment that calls to mind Kahlil Gibran’s insight into the delicate balance of intimacy and independence essential for romantic love — which is always an echo of our formative attachments — she adds:
It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.
With a wary eye to the brunt of parental expectation under which all children live, well into adulthood, she writes:
No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.
Perhaps that glimpse is what Maurice Sendak meant when he observed that life is largely a matter of “having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.”
Complement with Kahlil Gibran’s advice on children, the pioneering psychologist Donald Winnicott on the mother’s contribution to society, and Alison Bechdel’s superb Winnicott-inspired Are You My Mother?, then savor My Mother’s Eyes — a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love — and Mary Gaitskill’s poignant advice on how to move through life when your parents are dying.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-27 10:34:16
It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human beings hunger for constancy — our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on habit, our hearts yearning for everlasting love. We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to change reflected in the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we build the superstructure of belief that houses all of our actions, reactions, and choices.
It is not easy, reconfiguring this superstructure to fit something new — a new practice, a new person, a new way of being. The more transformative the new element, the more challenging it is to figure it into the pattern of life as we know it — a pattern shaped by what we believe about love, that deepest sinew of the self.
This delicate, difficult, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a soaring meditation on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, sparked by an unexpected revelation: When Williams opened the journals her mother had bequeathed her, she was staggered to find them all blank — a kind of “second death” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the meaning of voice, of words, of how we write the story of who we are and how we revise it, lensed through the love of birds she shared with her mother.
Two decades later, at the exact age her mother was when she died, Williams writes:
Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing.
Because we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — it is often chance, not choice, that brings about the profoundest change. Life sweeps us off course — a terrible diagnosis arrives, an unimagined opportunity emerges, an unexpected person enters the heart — and suddenly we must begin again, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It could happen any time…”)
Williams finds improbable consolation for the challenge of change in her encounter with a bird out of place. The painted bunting — the most exuberantly colored bird north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its exotic plumage that he falsely classified it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star during migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown off course, and stayed,” making a new life in Maine, a new pattern of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s bird feeder like clockwork.
Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:
At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and light. His silhouette grew toward color for the seven short minutes he stayed. And when dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.
[…]
The bunting got caught in a storm and stayed. I have been seized in a storm of my own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. In the wounding of becoming lost, I can correct myself.
Echoing Emerson’s indictment that “people wish to be settled [but] only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them,” Williams adds:
We can take flight from our lives in a form other than denial and return to our authentic selves… Accidental sightings, whether witnessed in a brain or on a winter dawn, remind us there is no such thing as certainty.
A century after Virginia Woolf contemplated finding beauty in the uncertainty of being in the interlude between two world wars, Williams adds:
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.
Complement these fragments of the entirely wonderful When Women Were Birds with Milan Kundera on life’s central ambivalence of knowing what we really want, Rebecca Solnit on how we find ourselves by getting lost, and George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit Williams on our responsibility to awe.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-26 22:02:54
“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.
The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the frosted windows of the here and now.
It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.
If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.
That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) explores in his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, found in his collection The Better Sort (public library | public domain) — the story of a man whose entire life, from his earliest memory, has been animated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” something fated “sooner or later to happen” and, in happening, to either destroy him or remake his life. He calls it “the thing,” imagines it as a “beast in the jungle” lying in wait for him, and spends his life lying in wait for it, withholding his participation in the very experiences that might have that transformative effect — leaping after some great dream, risking his life for some great cause, falling in love.
It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.
James writes:
Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
When the protagonist meets a woman to whom his entire being pulls him, he begins spending time with her but ultimately keeps her heart at arm’s length, too afraid to love her, telling himself that he is protecting her from his fatalistic fate, failing to recognize that love itself is that great force of self-annihilation and transformation, “rare and strange” even as the most commonplace human experience.
When Time forecloses possibility, as Time always ultimately does, he arrives at his final reckoning at her tombstone:
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself… The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips… This was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.
Complement with Anaïs Nin on how reading awakens us from the trance of near-living and Mary Oliver on the key to living with maximum aliveness, then revisit Henry James’s equally brilliant sister Alice on how to live fully while dying.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-26 07:31:50
“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer,” Derek Jarman wrote as he grieved his dying friends, faced his own death, and contemplated art, mortality, and resistance while planting a garden between an old lighthouse and a new nuclear plant on a barren shingled shore.
Jarman is one of the artists whom Olivia Laing profiles and celebrates in Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (public library) — her superb collection of meditations on art, activism, and our search for meaning, drawing on the lives of artists whose vision has changed the way we see the world, ourselves, and others.
Laing’s Jarman-fomented essay, titled “Paradise,” begins with the question of whether gardening is a form of art and ends with the question of whether art is a form of resistance — a necessary tool for building the Garden of Eden we imagine a flourishing society to be.
She writes:
Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere.
To bridge Laing’s two questions, one must somehow reconcile these two temporal models: linear time, which the Greek called chronos and along which we plot the vector of progress, and cyclical time, or kairos, which is the time of gardens and, Laing intimates, the time of societies. We long for the assurance of steady progression, yet all around us the rest of nature churns in cycles. How do the cicadas know when to awake from their seventeen-year slumbers and rise up by the billions to make new life that will in turn repeat the cycle? And the migratory birds, “how can they know that it’s time to go?,” as Nina Simone asked in her serenade to time — Nina Simone, who also chose to cover Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” and who gave all she had to a movement the central concerns of which have returned a life-season later with redoubled urgency, its fruits only just beginning to ripen in our lifetime.
Therein lies the paradox — how do we practice resistance if time is the substance we are made of, as Borges so timelessly observed, and yet we live suspended between these two parallel versions of time as we try to build paradise?
“Resistance” has always been a funny word to me — one without direct translation in my native Bulgarian, in this particular context of constructive social change. It contours something necessary but not sufficient — while ennobling and empowering in its implication of defying wrongness, it limits its own power by ending at what is to be eradicated, without indication of what is to be grown in its place and how. In this respect, the resistance approach to human nature (and the consensual collective byproduct of human natures we call society) is like the pesticide approach to nature.
“Resistance” is a word especially limited by the elemental fact that there are certain things simply beyond the reach of resistance, impervious to our passions and protestations — spacetime, gravity, the fundamental laws that gave rise to our existence and will eventually return us to the stardust of which we are made. Your face will sag and your spine will bend under the twin assault of gravity and time, and so will mine, until our atoms disband altogether to become food for the worm and fertilizer for the mycelial wonderland from which bluebells will rise some future spring.
None of this we can resist.
But maybe — and that is what redeems and consecrates our finite human lives and our limited powers — within those parameters, there is space enough and spirit enough to resist what is poisonous to the ideological soil we call culture and persist in planting, for as long as we have to live and with as much generosity as we have to give, something lush and beautiful. That we might never live to see it bloom might just be okay. To have planted the seeds is satisfaction enough worth living for.
Laing lands in a kindred place. A century and a half after Thoreau contemplated the long cycles of social change and an increment after Zadie Smith reminded us that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Laing writes after a pilgrimage to Derek Jarman’s grave:
Is art resistance? Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. But it seems to me that whatever else you do, it’s worth tending to paradise, however you define it and wherever it arises.
The arc of the moral universe might not be so different from that of the stem bent with bluebells tolling their vernal reminder that change comes in cycles. Every arc, after all, is but a segment of a circle. What it takes to draw our share of it with a steady hand as we try “widening our circles of compassion” without the assurance of immediate results — that is the question we each answer with our lives.
Poet and gardener Ross Gay comes closest to my own answer in his life-tested conviction that time spent gardening is “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.” As I roll in my palm six large seedpods of sea kale — a neglected flowering wonder I discovered on the pages of Derek Jarman’s journal — and thumb them into the moist Brooklyn soil where they may or may not sprout, I find more and more that attention is the elemental unit of time. Each moment we are fully paying attention is an atom of eternity. The quality of our attention measures the quantity of our aliveness — our sole generator of resistance and persistence.
This I know to be true: What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.
Complement with the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks on the healing power of gardens, then revisit Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-03-25 22:54:53
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to look at a lichen is a devotional act. We bless our own lives by recognizing and reverencing the details, the miniature marvels that make this improbable world what it is. And yet consciousness evolved to filter them out, to blur them into more abstract pictures we can parse, to sieves relevance from reality in order to save us from being too wonder-smitten by the flickering morning light on the edge of the kitchen sink and the iridescent eye of the house fly to move through our days. Cognitive scientists know this necessary ailment of consciousness: “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” Alexandra Horowitz wrote in one of my favorite books, examining the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” that is attention. Poets know the remedy: “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote, “is only a report.”
Paying conscious attention, then, is our primary instrument of loving the world, abiding by Iris Murdoch’s splendid definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” But because nothing abstract is real except mathematics, because love is made of the particular and the specific, to love anything — a person, a planet, your life — is at bottom a practice of noticing, which is always a devotional practice.
In The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (public library), Margaret Renkl chronicles her own reverence of reality across the seasons through the small acts of attention to wind and wren, to hemlock and hawk, which together reveal the grandeur of life. Partway between Henry Beston’s The Outermost House and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, what emerges is an invitation to override the mindless inertia that gets us through our days and pause to notice the details as a kind of mindfulness practice that magnifies the world.
She opens with a guided reverie under the tenderly commanding heading “Wherever You Are, Stop What You’re Doing”:
Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore…
Stop and ponder the skeleton of the snakeroot plant, each twig covered in tiny brown stars. The white petals, once embraced by bees, have dried to powder and now dust the forest floor, but here are the star-shaped sepals that held those fluffs of botanical celebration…
Stop and listen to the ragged-edged beech leaves, pale specters of the winter forest. They are chattering ghosts, clattering amid the bare branches of the other hardwoods. Wan light pours through their evanescence and burnishes them to gleaming. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, whole beech trees flare up into whispering creatures made of trembling gold.
Stop and consider the deep hollows of the persimmon’s bark, the way the tree has carved its own skin into neat rectangles of sturdy protection. See how the lacy lichens have found purchase in the channels, sharing space in the hollows…
Stop and peer at the hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the whir of hummingbird wings. Remember the green flash of hummingbird light.
In a sentiment evocative of Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare and haunting poem “Kinship,” Renkl adds:
Stop and think for a time about kinship. Think for a long time about kinship. The world lies before you, a lavish garden. However hobbled by waste, however fouled by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away. We were never cast out of Eden. We merely turned from it and shut our eyes. To return and be welcomed, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.
It may be that pausing to look is indeed our moral obligation to the universe — the ultimate affirmation of being alive, repaying our debt of gratitude for the supremely statistically improbable miracle of having been born at all, which makes the practice of noticing our mightiest antidote to the fear of death.
For Renkl, this suddenly becomes more than a philosophical disposition — in the final weeks of her yearlong chronicle, as autumn is lulling the living world into a state of suspended animation, a routine medical screening fissures the denial of death by which we survive our lives. When the biopsy comes back negative, Renkl readily recognizes that “such news is only ever a reprieve.” She writes:
Maybe it was the sudden sense of death dislodged, however temporarily, that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a feeling of kinship. Fallen leaves soften the path I walk on, but not for my sake. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures who are essential to this forest in a way that I will never be. The misty rain unstiffens deadwood, making places for nesting woodpeckers to excavate next spring. I can stop to count the rings of shelf fungi on a dead tree and know how long they have been growing, how long the death of the tree has been feeding the life of the forest.
So much life springs from all this death that to spend time in the woods is also to contemplate immortality. On the way out of the park I passed a red-tailed hawk lying at the base of a power pole, apparently electrocuted, its perfect wing extended in death. The vultures were already beginning to circle as I passed. I drove on, knowing what would come next, what always comes next: death to life, earth to air, wing to wing.
Death has always been the blood in the veins of life, coursing through it at every scale and in every season, but winter renders it especially palpable with its skeletal branches encoding the Braille promise of spring in the tiny dormant buds already preparing for the next emerald incarnation. Renkl writes:
[Winter] reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, an endless back and forth that makes something of everything, no matter how small, no matter how transitory. To be impermanent is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.
Complement The Comfort of Crows, a vivifying read in its entirety, with The Paradise Notebooks — a poet and a geographer’s love letter to life lensed through a 90-mile passage through the Sierra Nevada — and Katherine May on what wintering trees teach us about self-renewal through difficult times, then revisit philosopher Iain McGlilchrist on attention as an instrument of love.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.