Maria Popova's 'The Marginalian'

Wondering if others read her essays?
I love her approach and the depth of thinking.
I read most, not all and always feel inspired.

https://www.themarginalian.org/about/

  Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is my one-woman labor of love — marginalia on our search for meaning, from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books — free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human since 2006.
Born an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and eventually included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
 

todays...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/04/24/emily-ogden-bird/?mc_cid=d9423124b8&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/03/05/trees/?mc_cid=834ddedba8&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

...far beyond the realm of human-wrested metaphor, trees are sovereign marvels of nature, dazzling in the native poetics of their biological and ecological reality.
Their photosynthesis is nature’s way of making life from light.
Chlorophyll — which shares a chemical kinship with the hemoglobin in our blood — allows a tree to capture photons, extracting a portion of their energy to make the sugars that make it a tree — the raw material for leaves and bark and roots and branches — then releasing the photons at lower wavelengths back into the atmosphere.
A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air — an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.

I think you'll not be surprised to learn I've gotten her newsletter since it was Brain Pickings!
It's a long read that I usually limit to weekends, when I have time to reflect a bit more, but she is full of treasures.

😊 yes...not surprised at all Tereza!
I've been there since Brain Pickings also!

I end up with a backlog and have several in my email waiting for me to focus on them.

today's....
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/05/14/bertrand-russell-useless-knowledge/?mc_cid=a5d65c7469&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

   Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:

Learn something.

Help someone.

Feel it all.  

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/12/mary-oliver-upstream-creativity-power-time/?mc_cid=7d6e5520ea&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

 It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to thatcertainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you mustphone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.  

  Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

  In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

Maria Popova writes about Wendell Berry....
https://www.themarginalian.org/2024/12/14/wendell-berry-sabbath/?mc_cid=3df02bff6e&mc_eid=a3782d59bf

 The poet, farmer, and wise elder Wendell Berry, who once defined wisdom as “the art of minimums,” takes up these immense and intimate questions throughout his wonderful collection This Day (public library) — his series of sabbath poems composed between 1979 and 2013, celebrating the sabbath as a “rich and demanding” idea that “gains in meaning as it is brought out-of-doors and into a place where nature’s principles of self-sustaining wholeness and health are still evident,” a place where “the natural and the supernatural, the heavenly and the earthly, the soul and the body, the wondrous and the ordinary, all appear to occur together in the one fabric of creation.”