The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about… read article

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On Losing a Parent

We spend our lives mastering the art of losing. Our necessary losses shape us; the unnecessary, senseless, devastating losses bend our shape to test our breaking point. We can lose people to life — to conflict, to confusion, to the consequences of their trauma — losses painful precisely because it could be otherwise. We can lose people to death — losses painful because it can’t and never again will be otherwise. Of all our possible losses, the loss of a parent is the least evitable and the most complicated, for it is the most primal, most charged with the complexities… read article

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Actuality vs. Possibility and How to Hear the Signal of Your Life

Sitting atop a Spanish mesa one sweltering August night, watching the Perseid meteor showers streak the sky with the debris of a comet burning through the atmosphere against the backdrop of a billion dead stars whose signal light is only now reaching us, I found myself trembling with the parallel to life itself: The great paradox is that we are aflame with aliveness only as we burn through the atmosphere of now, and yet our lives are the story we constellate from the signals of bygone experience across the sky of time. To be truly alive is to inhabit the… read article

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The Canon of Solitude: 200 Years of Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness

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 theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, we may begin to hear in the silence the song of our own lives. “Give me solitude,” Whitman howled, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!” Gathered here are some of my favorite voices in praise of solitude, of its ample creative and… read article

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The Measure of a Life Well Lived: Henry Miller on How to Grow Old and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart

"If you can fall in love again and again ... if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical, man you've got it half licked."

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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions more plainly than our promises. False promises — those people make not intending to keep — are easier to comprehend, for they are simply a species of lying: garden-variety violations of trust. But it is our true promises — those we have every intention of keeping — that, when broken, most imperil us, most reveal our contradictions, most painfully violate our self-trust. Even the most sincere promise… read article

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Virginia Woolf on Creativity

"Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern... the whole world is a work of art... there is no Shakespeare... no Beethoven... no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."

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On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil Gibran

"Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself... You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow..."

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J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life

In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collection that gave us his uncommonly insightful meditation on fairy tales, the language of fantasy, and why there is no such thing as writing “for children.” He did love the book, so he agreed. But after two years of uneasy work on it, he finally conceded it was a betrayal of his lifelong credo that editorial introductions are an intrusion on the reader’s joy in… read article

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Thomas Bernhard on Walking, Thinking, and the Paradox of Self-Reflection

"There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking... Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust."

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The Peace of Wild Things: Wendell Berry’s Poetic Antidote to Despair, Animated

On where to seek refuge from the forethought of grief.

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Seneca on True and False Friendship

"Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul."

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The Moving Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Fossil Came Back to Life to Bring Humanity Together in the Middle of Our Deadliest War

How an ancient survivor of the unsurvivable became a triumph of the human spirit in a divided world.

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The Fascinating Science of How We Think Not with the Brain But with the World

"By reaching beyond the brain... we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone."

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How to Be a Good Explorer on the Lifelong Expedition to Yourself

Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its… read article

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A Beginning, Not a Decline: Colette on the Splendor of Autumn and the Autumn of Life

In praise of "the gaiety of those who have nothing more to lose and so excel at giving."

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The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

"And it is so simple... You will instantly find how to live."

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Why Leaves Change Color and How We Become Who We Are: The Science of Chlorophyll and the Poetics of Personhood

"We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us."

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The Unspeakable World: Alan Watts on How to Touch the Pulse of Life

What makes life so disorienting is that its greatest revelations and greatest transformations are inarticulable. William James knew this when he listed ineffability as the first of the four features of transcendent experiences. Everything beautiful and meaningful, from the grand elations to the small gladnesses that make life worth living, is irreducible to words, is sand slipping through the fingers of language as we try to capture it. Although we can transcend the limits of any one language by borrowing wonderful words from others, or inventing wonderful words, there is a fundamental limit to all language, to how much of… read article

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Albert Camus on the Source of Strength and How to Save Our Sanity in Trying Times

"In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer."

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The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind

"Every thought that has ever passed through your brain was made possible by plants."

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How to Change Your Life

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Maria Popova Don’t try to wash your tired hands clean from the bloodshed of your private wars. Just unclench the fist that has come to feel like home and let the story slip between your trembling fingers into the river of time, silver and indifferent. You may have to kneel for days or decades in a pool of silence blue and lonely as a heron but it will be there, the small green stone lying at the bottom lustrous with a peace larger than joy. When you rise, kiss the tombstone of your past… read article

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The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation: Adam Phillips on Our Ambivalent Desire for Change

"There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it."

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Kahlil Gibran on the Courage to Weather the Uncertainties of Love

"Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course."

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How to Break Free from the Tyranny of Certainty: The Japanese Concept of “Ma”

“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states, we yearn for a firm foothold on one side of every blurry line and move through the fundamental mystery of life armored in opinions, mistaking the magnitude of our surety for the measure of the truth, resisting with every fiber of our being the fertile, flickering in-betweenness that beckons us to not-know in order to touch the beating heart of reality with something… read article

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How Not to Waste Your Wildness

"What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary. In wildness, truth."

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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."

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I Long to Read More in the Book of You: Moomins Creator Tove Jansson’s Tender and Passionate Letters to the Love of Her Life

"I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves... I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom."

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The True Purpose of Tarot

“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that life has violated her predictions about what is possible, immediately followed by a reassertion of unquestioned confidence in her powers of prediction. The very fact that life surprises us is evidence that it can surprise us, that it will surprise us over and over. To mistake our theories of probability for a realistic representation of possibility is to forget that the improbable gave us all… read article

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How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Vulnerabilities of Being Human

"It's permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn't do, pitiful, beautiful human."

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