psychology – Brain Pickings

“All the poems of our lives are not yet made. We hear them crying to us,” Muriel Rukeyser writes in her timeless ode to the power of poetry. “Cry, heart, but never break,” entreats one of...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/11/02/art-of-crying-pepita-sandwich/

"I believe in... an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky. Its members are to be found in all nations and classes, and all through the ages, and there is a secret understan...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/10/31/e-m-forster-sensitive/

The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/10/20/kafka-diaries-self-doubt/

It never ceases to stagger that some stroke of chance in the early history of the universe set into motion the Rube Goldberg machine of events that turned atoms born in the first stars into you �...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/25/erikson-stages-of-development/

We move through the world as surfaces shimmering with the visibilia of our accomplishments, the undertow of our suffering invisible to passers-by. The selective collective memory we call history ...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/25/audubon-hardship/

In the late morning of the first day of August in 2023, exactly twenty summers after I arrived in Philadelphia as a lone teenager from a country thirteen centuries America’s senior, I experienc...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/22/winnicott-democracy/

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars,” Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska wrote in her lovely poem “Possibilities.” Our preferences, of course, hardly matter to time — we ...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/18/chronodiversity/

One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/11/great-blue-heron/

In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of hel...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/09/05/joy/

On "the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/27/adam-phillips-better-waiting/

"At almost every conceivable level of our imagining, it is impossible to create a change without a discontinuity, without a moment of not knowing who we are, or what we are going to become. Ruptu...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/22/weathering-ruth-allen/

"A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the ot...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/19/winnicott-care-cure/

Among the great salvations of my childhood were the rocks and minerals lining the bookshelves of our next door neighbor — a geologist working for the Bulgarian Ministry of Environment and Water...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/17/turning-to-stone-marcia-bjornerud/

One of the hardest things to learn in life is that the heart is a clock too fast not to break. We lurch into loving, only to discover again and again that it takes a long time to know people, to ...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/05/iris-murdoch-imagination/

"Nothing is easy when you might come apart in the middle at any moment."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/08/02/tove-jansson-summer-book-worm/

"Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/07/26/kierkegaard-either-or-relationships/

There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a th...

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/07/16/solitude/

"Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/07/09/erich-fromm-love-respect/

"Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain... passion's frequent aftermath."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/28/brodsky-boredom/

"It’s strange to feel change coming. It’s easy to ignore. An underlying restlessness seems to accompany it like birds flocking before a storm."

https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/06/18/terry-tempest-williams-refuge-change-denial/