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|  Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's special edition — how to love the world more, what it's like to meet an orca, how not to be a victim of success — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting it with a donation — it remains free and ad-free and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
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 You wouldn't have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn't have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length of the continent, carrying the weight of consciousness, and consciousness, how it windows this tenement of breath and bone with wonder, how it hovers over everything, gigantic and unnecessary, like love.
It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway. Our most beautiful, most transformative, most vivifying experiences and encounters are like that — they enter our lives through the back door of expectation, shattering the laws of probability with the golden gavel of the possible. In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship (public library), poet and philosopher David Whyte captures the terror and transcendence we are hurled into as we encounter, without looking for it, "a degree of mutually encoded knowledge" with another person that touches the center of our being and discomposes the superstructure of life as we know it.  Lee Miller and Friend by Man Ray. Paris, 1930. Whyte considers the insuperable force of truth pulsating beneath our resistance to such experiences:  Something inside the protective walls of… our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.
Trying to navigate the situation, we tend to rely on the intellect to "to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance," forgetting its immense blind spots and, still victims of Descartes all those epochs later, forgetting that the most alive parts of life are often profoundly unreasonable. Whyte writes: Beneath [our intellectual assessments], untiring but seldom listened to, we have…. a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.
It is not easy, this reconstitution of the self, this uncharted exploration of the possible in the improbable. But if the universe can do it, so can the living fractals of it that we are. Couple with David Whyte's staggering poem about reaching beyond our self-limiting stories about love, then revisit paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley on the first and final truth of life. donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains free and ad-free 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. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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One day not long after I moved to New York, I looked up from my writing desk at a shared studio space on the Brooklyn waterfront and saw the Manhattan Bridge halved, only the Brooklyn side remaining, the rest vanished into a sea of fog that had erased Manhattan. A sight with the strangeness of a dream, piercing the reality of the late-autumn morning. An augury, a living metaphor, a revelation: Every moment of transition is a bridge receding from the firm ground of the known life it into the fog of the possible, promising and menacing in all its opacity. We can only see one step ahead, but the bridge reveals itself firm under our feet as we keep walking, advancing by "the next right thing," parting the fog to touch the future.  Vanish by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.) For all its mystical quality, fog has a materiality that embodies the metabolism of this rocky world. It is a conversation between the landscape, its bodies of water, and the wind. Fog forms when the atmosphere cools enough for water droplets to condense into a low-flying cloud. In fact, it is a species of stratus cloud that has landed — an endangered species: Throughout Europe, fog has declined by 50% since 1970 and coastal fog all around the world is vanishing due to climate change, parching ecosystems and leaving landscapes much more vulnerable to wildfires. While it is still here, let it come — sudden as an owl or slow as daybreak, lasting just long for you to feel the breath of the Earth on your cheek, wet and primordial. In Chasing Fog (public library), writer and photographer Laura Pashby composes a beguiling love letter to "the wonder and soothing balm of fog," to "the irresistible romance of stepping into a cloud at ground level," to what it teaches us about the visible and the invisible.  Laura Pashby: self-portrait in fog A childhood like hers — spent under the sunless leaden skies of the Dartmoor's wilderness margined with fog, a castle ruin as her playground, the desolate moor as her pool — shapes a person, shapes how she sees the half-seen world. She writes: Fog is my muse: when I am in it, I see things differently. The known becomes unknown, the familiar unfamiliar. Fog disorientates, blurring the edges of everything — changing landscape, altering colour and softening light… A foggy morning is rich with mystery and magic, but also with possibility — the everyday feels otherworldly… Fog, like salt water, is completely other — it provides a shock, an escape, a release. […] While fog may seem to hang heavy, it is often vital, not static: dipping, waving, seeping, drifting and flowing. Fog is unpredictable — it is not soft and benign like cotton wool. In his 1919 essay "Das Unheimliche," Freud defined the uncanny as something that is both frightening yet familiar: the strangeness of the ordinary. This is exactly the effect that fog can have upon a landscape: when it quickly descends, it disorientates us, obscuring sight, changing familiar surroundings and making the known world seem odd and unsettling. It was this sensory experience that I felt compelled to explore first: the loss of sight as our vision is diminished by fog's descent; the feeling of a veil being drawn.
 Photograph by Laura Pashby In a lovely instance of the unphotographable, Pashby paints an enchanting picture in words: The fog flows up from the valley and slowly, slowly it fills the town. From my little loft-room study window, I watch it edge along the street like a whisper made visible, gently enveloping house after house, until it reaches mine. The huge beech tree in the garden opposite disappears completely, leaving only the echoing calls of its resident jackdaws — ghostly in the viscous air. The world beyond my open window fades to white. I want the fog to drift right in, curl cool tendrils around me and encircle me like smoke.
What emerges is the sense that fog is not only a phenomenon but an invitation — to draw the veil of the world and see it more closely, to see yourself unveiled and saturated with aliveness. (Anything you polish with attention will become a mirror.) Pashby writes: By paying close attention to fog… I have tried (imperfectly, truthfully) to bear witness, looking for beauty in a darkening world, for abundance where there so often is none, for clarity through a misted lens. […] If we listen, fog has much to teach us: about the landscape, the weatherscape and about who we are. We are all made of water — it passes through us and moves on, into the rain, into the river, into the ocean, into the fog. Each of us is fluid, mutable, magic, and we are not distinct from nature, we are nature. We are fog.
 Photograph by Laura Pashby Couple Chasing Fog with artist, poet, and philosopher Etel Adnan's slender and splendid book Sea & Fog, then revisit the Cloud Appreciation Society's delightful illustrated field guide to the science and wonder of clouds. donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains free and ad-free 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. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be. My recent love affair with artist and poet Rachel Hébert's almost unbearably beautiful Book of Thanks reminded me of a poem by W.S. Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019), found in his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (public library) — a book that lodges itself in the deepest recesses of your soul and stays with you for life. 
THANKS
by W.S. Merwin Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is
Couple with Billy Collins's ode to gratitude, then revisit Albert Camus, writing in the middle of a world war, on how to live whole in a broken world, and Oliver Sacks, writing at the event horizon of death, on the deepest measure of gratitude. donating=lovingThis year — the final year of the second decade of this reckoning with the search for meaning — I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. It remains free and ad-free 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. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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LAST DAY TO ENTER THE CERAMICS RAFFLE!
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