Our language betrays our self-betrayals ... But no one, not one person in the history of the heart, achieved love by striving. From the vantage of love, it is you who are lost; it is love that finds you — and not the way you expected ... newsletter ... .
“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to ... It’s a carve-out ... Onward ... .
The most maddening thing about life is also the most beautiful. its indeterminacy. The course of our lives, the fate of our species, the future of the universe. all undecided ... Art from An Almanac of Birds. 100Divinations for UncertainDays... INDECISION ... .
“We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” ... Now consider that our memory only retains a fraction of what we have attended to in moments past ... donating = loving ... newsletter ... Here’s what to expect ... .
Each time you look up at the night sky, you see only ancient signals — by the time a photon has reached your pupil, the star that emitted it may be long dead ... Transformative ideas can and often do fall on the closed eyes of their epoch ... .
Inside the brain’s secret portal to remembering the future ... truer than any narrative, more authentic than any performative personhood, unfettered from identity and expectation and all the other scripts we live by ... (Available as a print.) ... .
“However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth steps in and does something.” ... doing and the story of how he found his purpose. ‘Self-Portrait with Straw Hat’ by Vincent van Gogh.
“Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?” ... “Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticizing the views of an opponent?” Daniel Dennett ... Dennett synthesizes the steps. ... .
We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality ... preference. How odd to have a strong feeling about a color or an object or a sequence of chords ... newsletter ... .
“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself.”. “How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?” Maira Kalman pondered in her visual philosophy ... I think.
“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” ...Nested into the interview is his most direct advice to artists and the closest thing he ever formulated to a personal creative credo ... newsletter ... .
“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are. Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” ...Friedrich Nietzsche ... He found only one remedy — long solitary walks ... Afoot by MariaPopova ... .
“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” ... And yet to be a parent is to suffer the ceaseless anxiety of getting it wrong ... Mister Rogers ... Parenthood is not learned ... .
Nevertheless, the agency’s head, Anna Yuryevna Popova, traveled to Irkutsk on Friday, according to the local governor, Igor Kobzev, for what he described as an extraordinary meeting of the regional anti-epidemic commission ... Anti-epidemic measures ... .
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.” ... A century ago, D.H ...D.H. Lawrence ... It is all a question of sensitiveness ... Brute force crushes many plants ... newsletter ... .