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, for art, for happiness. Crowning the canon of branched reflections on what…
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 โ a distillation of the most important things I have learned about living while reading and writing my way through life;…
โDo you need a prod? / Do you need a little darkness to get you going?โ Mary Oliver asked in her stunning love poem to life, composed in the wake of a terrifying diagnosis. โLet me be as urgent as a knife, then, / and remind you of Keats, / so single of purpose and…
โSome dreams arenโt dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality,โ Patti Smith wrote in Year of the Monkey โ her exquisite dreamlike book-length prose poem about mending the broken realities of life, a meditation drawn from dreams that are โmuch more than dreams, as if originating from the dawn of mind.โ As I…
โYours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity,โ the poet turned marine biologist Rachel Carson enjoined a gathering of young people about to commence their lives as she was exiting hers, having catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her courageous 1962 book Silent Spring โMankind is challenged, as it…
In the mid-1950s, as the icy terror of the Cold War was cloaking the embering rubble of two World Wars, the BBC producer and cartoonist Hugh Burnett envisioned an unexampled program to serve both as a cross-cultural bridge and a mirror beaming back to a dimmed and discomposed humanity the noblest and most beautiful ideas…
โTruth always rests with the minority,โ the lonely and ostracized Kierkegaard fumed in his journal in 1850, โbecause the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.โ Across the Atlantic, another visionary of uncommon lucidity and…
Just when you begin rueing that nothing original could possibly remain to be written about the cosmic spectacle of a total solar eclipse โ after astronomer Maria Mitchellโs pioneering essay detailing the science and enchantment of the 1869 eclipse, after Virginia Woolfโs arresting 1927 account of total darkness in the celestial lighthouse, after Annie Dillardโs…
It is not often that one encounters a great love letter to a great love, composed by someone outside the private world of that love, serenading it across the spacetime of epochs and experiences. In my many years of dwelling in the lives and loves and letters of beloved artists, scientists, and writers, I have…
In 1845, as the forgotten visionary Margaret Fuller was laying the foundation of modern feminism, advocating for black voting rights, and insisting that โwhile any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble,โ she contemplated what makes a great leader and called for โno thin Idealist, no coarse Realist,โ for a person โof…
An invitation into the transcendent disquietude of those stirrings โthat can make or unmake a life,โ โthat have no right to go away.โ By Maria Popova The role of the artist, James Baldwin believed, is โto make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.โ This, too, is…
โI have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks โ who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering,โ Henry David Thoreau wrote in his classic manifesto for the spirit of sauntering, before proclaiming that โevery walk is…
โA cat must have three different names,โ T.S. Eliot proclaimed in the iconic verses that became the basis of one of the longest-running and most beloved Broadway musicals of all time. โYou can never know anyone as completely as you want. But thatโs okay, love is better,โ Caroline Paul wrote generations later in her gorgeous…
โIโm not a writer. Iโve been fooling myself and other people. I wish I were.โ So wrote John Steinbeck as he was working on the book that earned him a Pulitzer and paved the way for his Nobel Prize. โI am assailed with my own ignorance and inability,โ he exorcised the demon of self-doubt in…
To walk among trees is to be reminded that although relationships weave the fabric of life, one can only be in relationship โ in a forest or a family or a friendship โ when firmly planted in the sovereignty of oneโs own being, when resolutely reaching for oneโs own light. A century ago, Hermann Hesse…
