#maria popova

[explore-blog]

“We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb.”

The New York Times selects the best sentences of 2023.

#Maria Popova #quotes #philosophy #physics #language #writing

[seemoreandmore]

There are moments in life when we are reminded that we are unfinished, that the story we have been telling ourselves about who we are and where our life leads is yet unwritten. -Maria Popova

#maria popova

[luxe-pauvre]

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

Maria Popova, 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

#Maria Popova #17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

[araekniarchive]

Maybe you made one already but i wanted to request a web on mary oliver's quote "mostly i want to be kind"

Thank you💫🌸

S. Bear Bergman, Your Faithful Servant, from Butch Is A Noun

Kaveh Akbar, Against Hell

Mary Oliver, Dogfish

@seravph, I THINK I AM GOING TO CUT MY HAIR

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) dirs. Daniels

Billie Letts, Where the Heart Is

@chaoticsandstorm​, we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it

Maria Popova, ‘Naomi Shihab Nye’s Beloved Ode to Kindness, Animated’ for The Marginalian

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Patti Smith, Woolgathering

Danusha Laméris, Small Kindnesses

#webs #web weaving #theme: kindness #theme: choice #theme: morality #mine #requests #well this got out of hand somewhat #s. bear bergman #kaveh akbar #mary oliver #@seravph #everything everywhere all at once (2022) #billie letts #@chaoticsandstorm #maria popova #naomi shihab nye #(she gets a namecheck and the poem the article is about is VERY good) #susan sontag #(ww is fun because this quote in context is about her sex life) #patti smith #danusha laméris

[undinesea]

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

Maria Popova, from Figuring

#maria popova #quotes

[mostlybrunettes]

#maria popova

[guy60660]

Maria Popova

#maria popova #artsy

[wellconstructedsentences]

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

Maria Popova

#on love #maria popova

[nicecurves]

#maria popova #victoria che #vladimir nikolaev #bf #heelsit #soles #pair #fav

[dk-thrive]

We were never promised any of it

We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.

— Maria Popova, from "From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation" in the Marginalian", November 2, 2023

#Maria Popova #life #miracle #gratitude #earth

[explore-blog]

A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of space-time, strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know.

On clouds and Rachel Carson

#quote #Maria Popova #clouds #cloudspotting #culture and society #thought and opinion

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In a passage evocative of the central sentiment in Ursula K. Le Guin’s spare, stunning poem “Kinship,” he adds:

Pregnant women ate animals and plants made of her atoms. A year later, babies contained some of her atoms… Several years after her death, millions of children contained some of her atoms. And their children would contain some of her atoms as well. Their minds contained part of her mind. Will these millions of children, for generations upon future generations, know that some of their atoms cycled through this woman? It is not likely. Will they feel what she felt in her life, will their memories have flickering strokes of her memories, will they recall that moment long ago when she stood by the window, guilt ridden and confused, and watched as the tadr bird circled the cistern? No, it is not possible. Will they have some faint sense of her glimpse of the Void? No, it is not possible. It is not possible. But I will let them have their own brief glimpse of the Void, just at the moment they pass from living to dead, from animate to inanimate, from consciousness to that which has no consciousness. For a moment, they will understand infinity. And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts. Although without memory, they make a memory. Although impermanent, they make a permanence. Although scattered, they make a totality.

#Kinship #Ursula K.LeGuin #Maria Popova #living and dying #death #Rockwell Kent #nature #solitude #wilderness #weather

[luxe-pauvre]

“Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.

Maria Popova, 17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

#Maria Popova #17 Life-Learnings from 17 Years of The Marginalian

[victusinveritas]

"In October 1982, 83-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, who at that point had been blind for nearly 30 years, gathered sixty of his closest friends and admirers at a special dinner in New York. Susan Sontag was there. Speaking to a reporter covering the event, she captured the enormity of Borges’s spirit and significance with her signature eloquent precision, saying: 'There is no writer living today who matters more to other writers than Borges. Many people would say he is the greatest living writer … Very few writers of today have not learned from him or imitated him.'

"Borges died four years later.

"On the 10th anniversary of his death, Sontag revisited her admiration for his work and the enormity of his cultural legacy in a short and beautiful essay titled 'Letter to Borges,' penned on June 13, 1996, and included in the altogether fantastic 2001 collection 'Where the Stress Falls: Essays.'

"Sontag begins the letter, the proposition of which she deems not 'too odd' since Borges’s literature has always been 'placed under the sign of eternity,' with a sublime paean to his genius and humility:

"'You were very much the product of your time, your culture, and yet you knew how to transcend your time, your culture, in ways that seem quite magical. This had something to do with the openness and generosity of your attention. You were the least egocentric, the most transparent of writers, as well as the most artful. It also had something to do with a natural purity of spirit.

"'You had a sense of time that was different from other people’s. The ordinary ideas of past, present, and future seemed banal under your gaze. You liked to say that every moment of time contains the past and the future, quoting (as I remember) the poet Browning, who wrote something like 'the present is the instant in which the future crumbles into the past.' That, of course, was part of your modesty: your taste for finding your ideas in the ideas of other writers.'

"Sontag also referenced a famous quote of Borges, from "Twenty-Four Conversations with Borges: Including a Selection of Poems":

"A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art."

Thanks, again, to Maria Popova and The Marginalian.

#borges #jorge luis borges #susan sontag #quotes #life #maria popova

[sweetdreamsjeff]

Jeff Buckley on Music and Life: A Rare Interview with a Rare Soul

BY MARIA POPOVA

In 1995, while working for an Italian radio station, journalist Luisa Cotardo conducted a candid, soulful, and profound conversation with beloved musician Jeff Buckley (November 17, 1966–May 29, 1997). His only studio album, Grace — which includes Buckley’s now-iconic cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” — had been released a few months earlier and he had just performed in the town of Correggio in Northern Italy as part of his European tour. Less than two years later, at the age of thirty, he would drown by a tragedy of chance while swimming in Tennessee’s Wolf River during a tour. Rolling Stone later proclaimed him one of the 100 greatest singers of all time.

Cotardo has kindly shared with me her recording of this rare and remarkably rich interview, in which Buckley discusses with great openness and grace his philosophy on music and life. Transcribed highlights below.

On why he chose not to include lyrics in the album booklet, a deliberate effort to honor music as a deeply personal experience interpreted and inhabited differently by each listener:

So that instead of people being compelled to read through the blueprint of the songs — instead of them looking at the dance steps ahead of time, they would just go through the dance. So that they would let the songs happen to them. Later on, they will find out what the meaning is, but for now — I mean, you know, we’re just meeting for the first time and it’s better… It’s better to grab your own reality from it right now instead of like, you know, read.

On what he seeks to communicate with his music, echoing composer Aaron Copland’s conviction about the interplay of emotion and intellect in great music:

[What I want to communicate] doesn’t have a language with which I can communicate it. The things that I want to communicate are simply self-evident, emotional things. And the gifts of those things are that they bring both intellectual and emotional gifts — understanding. But I don’t really have a major message that I want to bring to the world through my music. The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It’s not my information, it’s not mine. I didn’t make it. I just discovered it.

On the problem with Western charity efforts like LiveAid:

I would like for the starvation and oppression to end in Africa. I like for money from concerned people to go there, you know, to go to Africa, to aid. But … the real solution will come from Africa ruling Africa and not Britain ruling Africa, not America ruling Africa — it’s the only real key. If Africa rules Africa, that’s the only way that pattern of oppression from the outside can be stopped — not money, not only money. Money is a tool and it can be, I don’t know, I really don’t… It’s great that Mandela came out and took office in Africa. I think that’s the real revolution.

On place and what constitutes home and belonging for a global nomad like himself:

I don’t know what belonging means… I can only use my brain and intellectualize. I really wouldn’t able to tell you from the heart what belonging means… My memories of that place are my link to the place — memories of your experience in a place is your link… All people belong to the world. There is no exclusivity in that… The soil from America can differ from the soil in Malaysia, but its soil, it’s still the same. And the color of people’s skin can differ from place to place but it’s still skin. And, in that regard, there is no difference. People must belong to the earth and a traveller must belong to world somehow and the world must belong to her or him somehow. But, you know, then there’s the social level — that’s just the archetypal level, people usually live in the social level.

Echoing what Jackson Pollock’s father so poetically told his son in 1928, Buckley parlays this into his humble yet wonderfully wise advice on being in the world:

I have no advice for anybody except to, you know, be awake enough to see where you are at any given time and how that is beautiful and has poetry inside, even in places you hate.

On one’s journey of self-actualization and the organic letting go of dreams that no longer fit that journey:

It’s part of maturity, to project upon your life goals and project upon your life realized dreams and a result that you want. It’s part of becoming whole … just like a childish game. It’s honest — it’s an honest game, because … you want your life to hold hope and possibility. It’s just that, when you get to the real meat of life, is that life has its own rhythm and you cannot impose your own structure upon it — you have to listen to what it tells you, and you have to listen to what your path tells you. It’s not earth that you move with a tractor — life is not like that. Life is more like earth that you learn about and plant seeds in… It’s something you have to have a relationship with in order to experience — you can’t mold it — you can’t control it…

#jeff buckley #jeffbuckley #Jeff Buckley on Music and Life: A Rare Interview with a Rare Soul #MARIA POPOVA #soundcloud #SoundCloud

[mostlybrunettes]

#maria popova #sergey korolkov