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 Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — 10 words for difficult emotions from around the world, the moving letter James Baldwin received from his childhood teacher, and more — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
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“Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only pathetic counterfeits,” Emily Dickinson sighed in one of her love letters to Susan an epoch before Kurt Vonnegut, in a short and lovely poem, distilled happiness to the knowledge that you have enough. It is not an easy knowledge to live with amid the commodified counterfeits of happiness that light up these sunset days of Western civilization, with its mesmerism of maximums and its cult of more, materially and spiritually — capitalism goads us to do more in order to own more while the secular church of self-improvement goads us to be more in order to do more.
Against this backdrop, to take a sabbath is a radical act, an act of countercultural courage and resistance, none more radical than a sabbath taken in nature — that eternal pasture of enoughness, which knew from the outset to create just enough more matter than antimatter for the first small seed of something to bloom into everything; which knows daily to make everything, from the electron to the elephant, take up just as much space and energy as it needs to be exactly what it is; which made every life finite and set a limit even to the speed of light.
To be in nature, without doing, is to be reminded that we are nature, too; that we cannot force the creative force that made us; that we need not keep breaking our own hearts on expectation’s cold hard edge of not-enough. 
Art from The Fate of Fausto by Oliver Jeffers — a modern fable about the existential triumph of enoughness, inspired by Vonnegut
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.”
In the preface, Berry considers how nature calibrates expectation — even in the creative act itself, where inspiration is not a reach for more but a letting be of what is, a surrender to reality, which is miracle enough:
 On Sunday mornings I often attend a church in which I sometimes sat with my grandfather, in which I sometimes sit with my grandchildren, and in which my wife plays the piano. But I am a bad-weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams… In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations — other people’s and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, and so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts: to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.
In how it thrives on the freedom from expectation, in how it demands a total surrender and breaks the moment it is demanded of, creativity has a lot in common with love. It may be that nature invented love to teach us the art of enoughness — to learn how to open the heart to another without condition or expectation, to be fully welcomed in another heart in order to learn the hardest axiom of being: that we are, and always were, enough. 
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days
Love’s salutary alchemy of enoughness comes alive in the second part of Berry’s eight-part sabbath poem of 1994:
Finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?
Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, ever-changing
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of the body for body,
unending light. You will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.
Couple with John J. Plenty and Fiddler Dan — a lovely vintage illustrated fable about the meaning and measure of enough — then revisit this soulful animated adaptation of Berry’s poem “The Peace of Wild Things” and his prose meditation on the nature of the universe lensed through a sunflower.
HT Cloud Appreciation Society
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“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss,” Judith Viorst wrote in her defense of life’s necessary losses, “and we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.”
We know that loving anything or anyone is a contract with loss, and yet we love anyway, our lives a ceaseless osmosis of holding on and letting go, an endless apprenticeship in the art of losing.
What we keep of our losses scaffolds who we become. What we let die within us — the tortured patterns, the ill-serving habits, the limiting beliefs — makes it possible to be reborn. And yet it is not easy, letting go of something we have lived with — a love, a dream, an idea of who we are. It can never be willed, only surrendered to, and not without the thrashes of denial, dissociation, and the thousand little lies we tell ourselves in order to hold on. To finally let go is to discover that life holds, that we can be held in something larger than fear, larger than grief, larger than ourselves.
Joan Didion (December 5, 1934–December 23, 2021) offers a spare, stirring field guide to doing that in the final pages of The Year of Magical Thinking (public library) — her classic reckoning with grief following the death of her husband of four decades, John Gregory Dunne. 
Joan Didion, 1977 (Photograph: Mary Lloyd Estrin)
Loosening the grip begins with the recognition that there is nothing solid enough in this world to hold on to, that transience is not a defect of things but their fundamental nature. Drawing on how plate tectonics revolutionized our understanding of life, Didion writes:
As the grandchild of a geologist I learned early to anticipate the absolute mutability of hills and waterfalls and even islands. When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it. When a 5.2 on the Richter Scale wrenches the writing table in my own room in my own house… I keep on typing. A hill is a transitional accommodation to stress… A waterfall is a self-correcting maladjustment of stream to structure… [The island] Oahu, an emergent post-erosional land mass along the Hawaiian Ridge, is a temporary feature, and every rainfall or tremor along the Pacific plates alters its shape and shortens its tenure as Crossroads of the Pacific.
When she took her husband’s ashes to St. John the Divine, Didion brought along a lei — the traditional flower garland of the South Pacific, made to be worn around the neck, often given to loved ones arriving or departing. Looking back on her life with John in the idyll of their young love in the Brentwood Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, looking back on her time living and writing in Hawaii, she leans on a poetic native ritual for letting go:
During the years when people still left Honolulu on the Matson Lines the custom at the moment of departure was to throw leis on the water, a promise that the traveler would return. The leis would get caught in the wake and go bruised and brown, the way the gardenias in the pool filter at the house in Brentwood Park had gone bruised and brown.
The other morning when I woke I tried to remember the arrangement of the rooms in the house in Brentwood Park. I imagined myself walking through the rooms, first on the ground floor and then on the second. Later in the day I realized that I had forgotten one.
The lei I left at St. John the Divine would have gone brown by now.
Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.
The final card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as stand-alone print.
The daily deaths of hopes and plans, the failed projects and failed relationships, are our training ground for letting go, a scale model of life’s most difficult losses — the death of a parent, the death of a child, the death of a soul mate. Because the way we meet any death is the way we meet every death, Didion’s reckoning with losing the love of her life maps the disorienting terrain of navigating any loss, letting go of anything that has died, or must die, within us so we may go on living a deeper, truer life. In a poignant counterpoint to Hemingway’s insistence that “no one you love is ever dead,” she writes:
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead… Let go of them in the water.
Couple with poet Jane Kenyon on the art of letting go, then revisit Carl Jung on death and how to be more alive.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
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“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rather than paralyzed by uncertainty. Most of the time, we brace behind structures of certainty to keep the native chaos of the universe, the fundamental indeterminacy and unpredictability of life, from drowning us in helplessness. But each time we part the bars of conviction and opinion to step out from this cell of certitude, or are evicted from it by some existential cataclysm, we discover that the most interesting parts of life, the most fulfilling experiences, the richest relationships, are found in the spaces between categories, in the unclassifiable, the unnameable, the deliriously disorienting. 
Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
In 1969, after nearly two decades of living among the Ndembu people of Zambia, the Scottish cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (May 28, 1920–December 18, 1983) took up the question of how we classify and declassify life in his classic The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (public library).
Terming these fertile in-between spaces liminality — a word coined a generation earlier by the French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep from limen, Latin for “threshold” — Turner observes that all rites of passage have liminality at their center: the moment between renouncing the familiar fixed point and reincorporating into the transformed state. This is why in every society those who live in liminality — those who either choose to or are forced to exist in the margins — are those most likely to be catalysts for transformation.
Half a century before Rebecca Solnit insisted in her epochal manifesto for active hope that “power comes from the shadows and the margins,” Turner writes:
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention… Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
Liminality is a function of, and made possible by, what Turner terms communitas — the recognition of “an essential and generic human bond, without which there could be no society.” Different from community in that it doesn’t necessarily involve “an area of common living,” communitas is a kind of social anti-structure — an alternative organizing principle to the standard model of society as “a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating [people] in terms of ‘more’ or ‘less.'”
Ursula K. Le Guin, whose daring defiance of gender, race, and class structures was greatly influenced by Turner’s work, captures the contrast perfectly:
Structure in society… is cognitive, communitas existential; structure provides a model, communitas a potential; structure classifies, communitas reclassifies; structure is expressed in legal and political institutions, communitas in art and religion.
Turner writes:
Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere held to be sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships and is accompanied by experiences of unprecedented potency… Instinctual energies are surely liberated by these processes.
Intuition — what we call these “instinctual energies” — may indeed be nothing more than those rare moments when we break the rim of our structured reality and glimpse, however briefly, a truth larger and more fluid than any container can hold, touching within it the sacred liminality of life itself.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
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one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
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| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
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FINAL MONTH OF THE RAFFLE
COME CELEBRATE 20 YEARS
Details and tickets here.
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