themarginalian.org

How to Bear Your Sorrows: Nick Cave on Integrating the Darkness of Loss with the Bright Ongoingness of Life

I am not saying this just to offer comfort to those who have lost someone, as if to say that in time everything will be all right, because even though it will be, it won't be. Rather, I am acknowledging that although this day marks the 11th anniversary of the worst day of our lives, it is also a beautiful day, with the sun shining, a child playing, a man enjoying a cigarette, a world quietly waking and moving forward.

themarginalian.org

The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Art is the music we make from the bewildered cry of being alive — sometimes a cry of exultant astonishment, but often a cry of devastation at the collision between our wishes and the will of the world. Every artist's art is their coping mechanism for what they are living through — the longings, the heartbreaks, the triumphs, the wars within and without.

themarginalian.org

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctly other than our own, whose very otherness clarifies ours, returns us to it magnified and annealed.

themarginalian.org

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.

themarginalian.org

Existentialist Embroidery

A tradition is not a material entity that can survive apart from any human agency. It can live only by a people's power to grasp its structure, and to answer to the warmth of its fires.

jefftweedy

Judy Just Left (Ball of Light) (2026 Revision)

What I'm talking about is a moment where you can be convinced that there's an unknown, deeper order for things. A meaning behind it all, even if we're just trying to apply meaning to coincidence. But it's sweet enough, to me, even if it's just a reminder that we make meaning.

themarginalian.org

The Enemy Outside and the Enemy Within: Audre Lorde’s Antidote to Despair

I do not have to win in order to know my dreams are valid, I only have to believe in a process of which I am a part. My work kept me alive this past year, my work and the love of women. They are inseparable from each other. In the recognition of the existence of love lies the answer to despair. Work is that recognition given voice and name.

themarginalian.org

Let Your Heart Be Broken

The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.

themarginalian.org

3 Kinds of Loneliness and 4 Kinds of Forever

Everything of beauty and substance that we make — every poem, every painting, every friendship — is an outstretched hand reaching out from one loneliness to another, reaching into the mute mouth of forever for the vowels of a common language to howl our requiem for the evanescent now.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jannes Soerensen

At their best, they return you to yourself. I left The Beaumont in 2021 to build Kepler — a hospitality company built around attention, care and meaning.

themarginalian.org

Mary Oliver on the Measure of a Life Well Lived and How to Magnify Your Aliveness

I know, you never intended to be in this world. But you're in it all the same. So why not get started immediately. I mean, belonging to it. There is so much to admire, to weep over.

whyisthisinteresting

The Romantic Education Edition

Reflecting on these efforts, it strikes me that in much the same way I would fill in all the action in a comic book between the panels, I was reaching to understand adult relations—an unchartered land of intrigue, heartbreak and some little thing called "love". There was no guide, there was no chatbot to inquire of.

themarginalian.org

Wilderness, Solitude, and Creativity: Artist and Philosopher Rockwell Kent’s Century-Old Meditations on Art and Life During Seven Months on a Small Alaskan Island

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite.

themarginalian.org

Flowers for Things I Don’t Know How to Say: A Tender Painted Lexicon of Consolation and Connection

We need flowers for the same reason we need poems, or paintings, or songs — because what we can feel will always be infinitely vaster and more complex than what we can name, because words will always break under the weight of the immensities we task them with carrying, will never fully answer the soul's cry for connection, for consolation, for mercy.

themarginalian.org

Michael Rosen’s Sad Book: A Beautiful Anatomy of Loss, Illustrated by Quentin Blake

What emerges is a breathtaking bow before the central paradox of the human experience — the awareness that the heart's enormous capacity for love is matched with an equal capacity for pain, and yet we love anyway and somehow find fragments of that love even amid the ruins of loss.

themarginalian.org

Something Deeper Than Hope: Terry Tempest Williams on Our Stays Against Despair

there must be something deeper than hope — more prayerful, more purposeful, more pulsating with aliveness.

3quarksdaily.com

Heated Rivalry In Russia

After the finale, what's left isn't the euphoria you get from so many series. It's the opposite: emptiness, and the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the story again, already knowing how much pain and, at the same time, tenderness is hidden inside it.