Category Archives: Inspire

On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf | Literary Hub

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of … Continue reading

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Reflections on Our Pilgrimage Into Society | By Gabriele Castagnoli, Sesto Castagnoli in Kosmos Journal

In February 2016, we started out on a pilgrimage—one with no time limit. Beforehand, we had given away all our possessions except the contents of our two rucksacks. The wish to do so came up when we were planning our … Continue reading

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Neoliberalism is creating loneliness. That’s what’s wrenching society apart | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

From the wonderful George Monbiot, originally published in the Guardian Wednesday 12 October 2016 06.30 BST What greater indictment of a system could there be than an epidemic of mental illness? Yet plagues of anxiety, stress, depression, social phobia, eating … Continue reading

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Spring came early this year

It was only the last week in March when the first geese flew northwards over the city and even earlier than that when a brown hare crossed my path, its winter coat of white quite gone. In this last week … Continue reading

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Insomniac City: Bill Hayes’s Extraordinary Love Letter to New York, Oliver Sacks, and Love Itself – Brain Pickings

“The most we can do is to write — intelligently, creatively, evocatively — about what it is like living in the world at this time.” BY MARIA POPOVA “If you are too much like myself, what shall I learn of … Continue reading

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Leonard Cohen on Creativity, Hard Work, and Why You Should Never Quit Before You Know What It Is You’re Quitting. BY MARIA POPOVA on BrainPickings

“The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.” BY MARIA POPOVA Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen (b. September 21, 1934) is among the most exhilarating creative spirits of the past century. Recipient … Continue reading

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The day the music ended.

November 10, 2016 There is something sadly synchronistic that we should lose Leonard Cohen in a week that has held up a mirror to democracy in the US and beyond, in which a man who has deliberately and calculatingly fanned the flames … Continue reading

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Love and War with Spoken Word Artist Andrea Gibson – YouTube

On the morning after the most unthinkable US election result, when the Black American US President will meet to talk about transition to the white man who has given license to unbridled bigotry, hatred, racism, xenophobia and so much more, … Continue reading

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Ursula K. Le Guin on Being a Man – Brain Pickings

BY MARIA POPOVA Who are we when we, to borrow Hannah Arendt’s enduring words, “are together with no one but ourselves”? However much we might exert ourselves on learning to stop letting others define us, the definitions continue to be hurled at … Continue reading

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The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life – by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be … Continue reading

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