A glance over the shoulder of time to reveal the patterns, themes, and ideas that steady us and shelter us in the tempest of life.
Like every year, this annual glance over the shoulder of time is a composite of the essays that most resonated with readers and those I most enjoyed writing, the overlap being always significant but always the Venn diagram of a partial eclipse rather than a perfect totality.
Even more so than other years, in this particularly trying year, it has been curious to observe the patterns that emerge across those ideas, themes, and regions of being that most sustain us in times of crisis: love, trees, poetry, creativity, the stubborn insistence on life in the face of loss, the constancy of nature’s consolations, the revivifying passion to go on making, go on loving, go on living.
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Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings
Read it here.
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Antidotes to Fear of Death: Astrophysicist Janna Levin Reads Astronomer and Poet Rebecca Elson’s Stunning Cosmic Salve for Our Creaturely Tremblings of Heart
Read it here.
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Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s Lost Lectures on Moving Beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning
Read it here.
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Seasons in a Pandemic: Mary Shelley on What Makes Life Worth Living and Nature’s Beauty as a Lifeline to Regaining Sanity
Read it here.
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Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit
Read it here.
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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
Read it here.
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Bloom: A Touching Animated Short Film about Depression and What It Takes to Recover the Light of Being
Read it here.
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The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests
Read it here.
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Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science
Read it here.
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Nick Cave on Living with Loss and the Central Paradox of Grief as a Portal to Aliveness
Read it here.
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Walt Whitman on What Makes a Great Person and What Wisdom Really Means
Read it here.
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Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film
Read it here.
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The Radical Act of Letting Things Hurt: How (Not) to Help a Friend in Sorrow
Read it here.
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Octavia Butler on How (Not) to Choose Our Leaders
Read it here.
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The Spirit of the Woods: Poet and Painter Rebecca Hey’s Gorgeous 19th-Century Illustrations for the World’s First Encyclopedia of Trees
Read it here.
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What It Takes to Grow Up, What It Means to Have Grown
Read it here.
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The Osbick Bird: Edward Gorey’s Tender and Surprising Vintage Illustrated Allegory About the Meaning of True Love
Read it here.
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A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe
Read it here.
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How an Artist is Like a Tree: Paul Klee on Creativity
Read it here.
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How to Live and How to Die
Read it here.
Complement with the year’s most nourishing books.
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