“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” The history of the world is the history of telling others who and what we are — from tribal markings to national flags to family crests to pronoun-specifying email signatures. Every war that has ever been […]
“Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful positive obsession blunts pain, diverts rage, and engages each of us in the greatest, the most intense of our chosen struggles.” After the glorious accident of having been born at all, there are myriad ways any one life could be lived. The lives we do live are […]
In praise of that quiet, nonjudgmental place of permission where all healing begins. The strange thing about life, the wondrous thing about life, is that it is impossible to dull one hue of our emotional experience without dulling the entire spectrum, impossible to feel deeply at one end of it without feeling as deeply at […]
“Children in wonder watching the stars, is the aim and the end.” Trees are unworded thoughts, periscopes of perspective. They are both less alive than we think and more sentient than we thought. In them, we see what we are and see what we can be. From them, we draw our best metaphors for love, […]
“The more a creature’s life is worth, the less of it is alive.” When the young Alan Turing (June 23, 1912–June 7, 1954) lost the love of his life, Christopher, to a bacterium contracted from cow’s milk, the grief-savaged future father of computing comforted his beloved’s grief-savaged mother by telling her that “the body provides […]
On the weight of the world and the weight of the sky. Brain Pickings was born on October 23, 2006, as a short email to seven friends. Seven years and several incomprehensible million readers into its existence, I began what has since become an annual tradition — a distillation of the most important things I […]
Inside the hallmark of a great scientist and a great human being — the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers. This essay is adapted from my book Figuring A middle-aged Scottish mathematician rises ahead of the sun to spend a couple of hours with Newton before the day punctuates her thinking […]
“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized.” This is the […]
“The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible. It is living void because all forms come out of it, and whosoever realizes the void is filled with life and power and the love of all beings.” “Do you need a prod? / Do you need a little […]
A synesthetic invitation to dance across the full span of the spectrum within and without. One of the most bewildering things about life is how ever-shifting the inner weather systems are, yet how wholly each storm consumes us when it comes, how completely suffering not only darkens the inner firmament but dims the prospective imagination […]