From the Stoics to the snails, by way of music, matter, and 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.
Inevitably, patterns emerge that were not obvious in the moment-by-moment experience. 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.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for caring.
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Rilke on the Relationship Between Solitude, Love, Sex, and Creativity
Read it here.
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Becoming the Marginalian: After 15 Years, Brain Pickings Reborn
Read it here.
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James Baldwin on Love, the Illusion of Choice, and the Paradox of Freedom
Read it here.
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The Snail with the Right Heart: A True Story of Science and Love
Read it here.
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Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Restrings the Brain
Read it here.
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The Antidote to the Irreversibility of Life: Hannah Arendt on What Forgiveness Really Means
Read it here.
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The Ocean and the Meaning of Life
Read it here.
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Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
Read it here.
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Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living
Read it here.
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The Pattern Inside the Pattern: Fractals, the Hidden Order Beneath Chaos, and the Story of the Refugee Who Revolutionized the Mathematics of Reality
Read it here.
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Shifting the Silence to Find the Meaning: 95-Year-Old Artist, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on How to Live and How to Die
Read it here.
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The Blue Hour: A Stunning Illustrated Celebration of Nature’s Rarest Color
Read it here.
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Wintering: Resilience, the Wisdom of Sadness, and How the Science of Trees Illuminates the Art of Self-Renewal Through Difficult Times
Read it here.
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Love, Loss, and the Banality of Survival: Charles Darwin, His Beloved Daughter, and How We Find Meaning in Mortality
Read it here.
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Of Trees, Tenderness, and the Moon: Hasui Kawase’s Stunning Japanese Woodblock Prints from the 1920s-1950s
Read it here.
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The Stoic Antidote to Frustration: Marcus Aurelius on How to Keep Your Mental Composure and Emotional Equanimity When People Let You Down
Read it here.
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Growing Through Grief: Derek Jarman on Gardening as Creative Redemption, Consecration of Time, and Training Ground for Presence
Read it here.
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The Truelove: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About What We Deserve
Read it here.
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Trees, Whales, and Our Digital Future: George Dyson on Nature, Human Nature, and the Relationship Between Our Minds and Our Machines
Read it here.
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Music and the Mystery of Aliveness
Read it here.
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The Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Artist Franz Marc, the Wisdom of Animals, and the Fight of Beauty Against Brutality
Read it here.
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Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship
Read it here.
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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
Read it here.
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When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive
Read it here.
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The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
Read it here.
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The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength
Read it here.
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For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable 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.
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