Tag Archives: Maria Popova

Oct23

this is worth sharing

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I am a big fan of Maria Popova and her blog Brain Pickings.  In the world of self-absorbed, politicizing, opinionizing writing, her blog is the one that provides real portals for investigation, learning, reflection.

Her latest post on her 9 Learnings is worth a close read – more than one, in fact.  So is her interview with Krista Tippett, on On Being, who calls her a “cartographer of meaning in a digital age.”

If you haven’t visited Brain Pickings, you are in for a treat.  If you have, you know what I mean.

 

 

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Aug10

searching

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I watched the Fox news clown show Thursday night followed by Jon Stewart’s farewell program and felt a sinking despair.  What to do without the leavening, enlightening perspective of this brilliant generous man?  Where to look for a lift of mind, heart and spirit?  Rachel Maddow and the MSNBC crew, of course, but the comedic aeration is essential.

Another search: we are house hunting.  Looking high and low for what may be the next best fit for our complicated lives.  There is something about this process that makes me want to consider Italy, Spain, France, England. None of those places is exempt from political madness either. My family’s roots are in Norway, but that feels distant, cold and deeply unknown.

I love New York.  I hate winter.  I love the ocean.  I don’t like tourists.  The list goes on and on like a crazy ping pong match.  My angst blooms and morphs like the weird spongy thing I saw growing under a rock when I was eight and exploring the ravine behind our house.  I remember flying up the hill, horrified by whatever was growing there.  Feels a little like that, especially whatever is growing in the political murk.

Finding the balance between doing the work and letting the universe hold it and hold me is the tricky part.  I heard a wonderful quote by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings in the On Being podcast the other day.  She said that critical thinking without hope is cynicism, and that hope without critical thinking is naivete.  I think that arcs back to both my search for sanity and humor in the social-political world, and my search for a home.

Another thing that Maria Popova said was that the search for genuine insight, understanding, connection (not her words, but my translation) takes time.  Really steeping oneself in a thought, a book, a conversation, a process of creation, rather than the superficial fast forward of listicles.

Searching should take time.  It should ask us to look deeply, meditate, feel into the question, the poem, the place, the moment.  Or in the profound invitation of the practice of Authentic Movement, wait to be moved.

 

 

 

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