Public Posts

“Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings… Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying.” Click to read the full Maria Popova's article on Brain Pickings

From the hidden universe beneath our feet to delight as a counter-cultural force of courage and resistance, by way of Patti Smith, Toni Morrison, and the Greek myths..................Click to read Maria Popova's article on Brain Pickings

Great children’s books are really miniature cartographies of meaning, emissaries of the deepest existential wisdom that cut across all lines of division, scuttle past the many walls adulthood has sold us on erecting, and slip in through the backdoor of our consciousness to speak — in the language of children, which is the language of unselfconscious sincerity — the most timeless truths to the truest parts of us.................................Click to read the full article at Brain Pickings

"Given that it serves as the brain’s built-in therapy mechanism regulating our negative moods, given that it acts as the brain’s janitor sweeping away toxins responsible for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, sleep may be the closest thing we have a superpower" ................. Read more

https://www.brainpickings.org

Maria Popova shares the most important things her all-consuming daily endeavor taught her about writing and living. Read More

"We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. There is a strange and sorrowful loneliness to this, to being a creature that carries its fragile sense of self in a bag of skin on an endless pilgrimage to some promised land of belonging. We are willing to erect many defenses to hedge against that loneliness and fortress our fragility. But every once in a while, we encounter another such creature who reminds us with the sweetness of persistent yet undemanding affection that we need not walk alone".......Read more

"Potoroos, birds of paradise, variegated lizards, and other wondrous creatures brought to vibrant life by a visionary woman in the golden age of scientific exploration"..........Click to read more

Wangari Maathai (1940 - 2011) Renowned Kenyan social, environmental and political activist and the first African woman to win the Nobel Prize. She founded The Green Belt Movement in 1977

French children’s book author Franck Prévot and illustrator Aurélia Fronty tell her remarkable story in Wangari Maathai: The Woman Who Planted Millions of Trees  - You can learn more at Brain Pickings in Maria Popovas's article "Planting trees as resistance and empowerment" 

Photo credit : The Green Belt Movement

“We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other… knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category of intelligence, is generally what serious education is about.”  Read more 

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) American writer, born in Lorain, Ohio,  She received the the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993

"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours."...................Click  to read  Maria Popova's Brain Pickings article about  Kenyon’s "A Hundred White Daffodils: Essays, Interviews, The Akhmatova Translations, Newspaper Columns, and One Poem"

“Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny.” .......... Read more

“Oh, there must be a little bit of air, a little bit of happiness, but chiefly to let the form be felt, to make the lines of the silhouette speak. But let the whole be sombre.”

Chance doesn’t deal happiness with an even hand — some lives are more weighed down by sorrow than others. It can be easy, and misguided, to romanticize suffering ...........Read more