#Mary Oliver

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom,” naturalist Sy Montgomery wrote in her lyrical reflection on what thirteen animals taught her about how to be a good creature. And yet, for

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Books feed and cure and chortle and collide,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her 1969 ode to why we read. For Kafka, a book was “the axe for the frozen sea inside us”; for Galileo, nothing less than a source of superhuman powers. “Without the writing of

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings Once a year, every year, I reread The Little Prince and manage to find in it new layers of loveliness and wisdom each time, always seemingly written to allay whatever my greatest struggle at that moment is. It is a special book, yes, but it is not

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “The most regretful people on earth,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in contemplating the artist’s task and the central commitment of the creative life, “are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising,

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings A hymn to the numinous splendor of nature. “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” wrote the French philosopher Simone Weil in contemplating gravity and grace. “Attention without feeling,” the poet Mary Oliver observed