Delicious phrases
we open each meeting by asking a simple question: what is keeping you alive today? this allows us to revel in the sometimes small motions that get us to the Next Thing. yes, i did not want to get out of bed this morning, but there was one single long shard of sunlight that stumbled in through a tear in my curtains, and the warmth of it hitting my a... See more
Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.
Maria Popova • The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and ... See more
Maria Popova • The Marginalian
xeno n. the smallest measurable unit of human connection, typically exchanged between passing strangers—a flirtatious glance, a sympathetic nod, a shared laugh about some odd coincidence—moments that are fleeting and random but still contain powerful emotional nutrients that can alleviate the symptoms of feeling alone.
For me it has been less a building and more a ritual: prayer beads, mantras, a worry stone.
Eddie Grace • Attention Required! | Cloudflare
the belief that divinity is to be found not in some outside deity, but in the human soul itself, in its fidelity to itself as a fractal of nature, a particle of the perfect totality of the universe, which Margaret Fuller — Emerson’s greatest influence — called “the All.”
Maria Popova • Emerson on How to Trust Yourself and What Solitude Really Means
mahpiohanzia n. the disappointment of being unable to fly, unable to stretch out your arms and vault into the air, having finally shrugged off the ballast of your own weight and ignited the fuel tank of unfulfilled desires you've been storing up since before you were born.
onism n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only
... See moreWriting, Coates recalls, was one of the great “obsessions” of his childhood — he relished the “private ecstasy” found in “the organization of words, silences, and sound into stories,” in “the employment of particular verbs, the playful placement of punctuation,” this mysterious alchemy of skill and vision with the power to “make the abstract and di... See more