The Marginalian
The Marginalian

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The Creative Accident: Visionary Ceramicist Edith Heath on Serendipity, the Antidote to Obsolescence, and the Five Pillars of Timelessness
The Creative Accident: Visionary Ceramicist Edith Heath on Serendipity, the Antidote to Obsolescence, and the Five Pillars of Timelessness

On aligning the things we make with basic human values for an enduring world.

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The Unphotographabe: Walt Whitman on Birds Migrating at Midnight
The Unphotographabe: Walt Whitman on Birds Migrating at Midnight

Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.

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Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society
Audre Lorde on What to Do When Difference Ruptures Society

“My responsibility is to speak the truth as I feel it, and to attempt to speak it with as much precision and beauty as possible.”

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Rootedness and Reclaiming God
Rootedness and Reclaiming God

“Everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.”

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How to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others): Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Trees
How to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others): Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Trees

A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being.

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In Search of the Sacred: Pico Iyer on Our Models of Paradise
In Search of the Sacred: Pico Iyer on Our Models of Paradise

“The thought that we must die… is the reason we must live well.”

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The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War
The Remarkable Story of the Dawn Redwood: How a Living Fossil Brought Humanity Together in the Middle of a World War

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

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Turning Loss and Loneliness into Wonder: How the Victorian Visionary Marianne North Revolutionized Art and Science with Her Botanical Paintings
Turning Loss and Loneliness into Wonder: How the Victorian Visionary Marianne North Revolutionized Art and Science with Her Botanical Paintings

A vibrant foray into “a perfect world of wonders” fueled by the bittersweet dimension of life.

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The Unphotographable: The Moon, the Tide, and the Living Shore
The Unphotographable: The Moon, the Tide, and the Living Shore

Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of Susan Sontag, who called it “aesthetic consumerism” half a century before Instagram. In a small act of resistance, I offer The Unphotographable — Saturdays, a lovely image in words drawn from centuries of literature: passages transcendent and transportive, depicting landscapes and experiences radiant with beauty and feeling beyond what a visual image could convey.

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A Responsibility to Wonder: Pioneering Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on the Spirituality of Nature
A Responsibility to Wonder: Pioneering Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on the Spirituality of Nature

“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.”

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