The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Some Blessings to Begin with

It is good, I feel, to begin a new year, or a new day, with a little reservoir of gladness. Here are some gladnesses I have gathered, and two new bird divinations I have made, as a conscious way of consecrating our days with the blessed fact that we weren’t promised any of this — that the universe didn’t owe us mountains and music, that we didn’t have to be born, and yet here we are with our physics and our poems and our ever-breaking, ever-broadening hearts.

Wood thrush divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Bless the last aspen leaf, waving at the tip of the skeletal branch like a bright yellow flag of resistance to gravity and time, beckoning an allegiance to life.

Bless gravity for how indiscriminately it gives itself to a mote of dust and to a mountain, for how it keeps every single celestial body in orbit for this perfect cosmos to cohere, for how it presses your lover’s body against you to gladden the skin of the soul.

Bless the person who broke your heart to keep their own from breaking on the hard edge of the courage called love.

Bless paper for the way it can kindle a campfire and a revolution, for the delicious confusion of cedar and velvet at the tip of your finger each time you turn the page, for its whispered promise that when all the empires of silicon and bit go the way of Babylon and Rome, it will remain the keeper of our stories.

Bless table tennis for its absurd delight, for the boyish smile on the wrinkled face of the man at the rec center as he props his cane against the wall to pick up the paddle.

Bless blue, for making the bluebird and the sky it flies through what they are.

Bless consciousness, for making blue different to me than it is to you.

Bless mathematics for giving a ballot its weight and Bach his Goldberg Variations.

Bless the clouds, the way they drift across the sky like the thought bubbles of birds, the way they cast a spell against indifference each time they awn the setting sun.

Hummingbird divination from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.

Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.

Bless time, for how despite all its blessed and blessing indifference, it gave the aspen leaf that little extra bit to blaze and gave us, each and every one of us alive, this symphonic interlude between the eternal silence of not yet and never again.

Bless the stranger at the bookstore who suddenly smiles the smile, the exact smile, of my dead friend, as if to remind me that nothing we love is ever dead, that love is the smile that saves life from mere existence.

Bless every grain of sand that made the glass that made binoculars to reveal the cormorant’s dazzling rimmed eye the color of Uranus and telescopes to reveal the nebula three thousand lightyears away looking back at us like a giant cosmic iris with its secret knowledge of what we are.

Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.

BP

The Promethean Power of Burnout

The Promethean Power of Burnout

In every creative life, in every life of passion and purpose, there comes a time when the animating spark grows dim and the muscle of motivation slackens, when you come to feel benumbed to beauty and abandoned by your numen, suffocating in the exhaust fume of your own exertion, ossified with the tedium of being yourself.

We call those moments burnout, and we feel them most acutely as we approach the final horizon of a project, a year, a chapter of life. And yet, just as breakdowns can deepen our self-knowledge and despair can invite the sacred pause preceding regeneration, burnout can become the hearth of change — that urgent and necessary change without which the lulling inertia of our lives would always keep us a short distance from alive.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

This secret Promethean power of burnout is what poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in one of the sort, searching essays collected in his Consolations II — the continuation of his earlier emotional dictionary defining the deeper and often ineffable meanings of everyday words, which was among my favorite books of the year.

In the entry for the word burnout, he writes:

Burnout feels like a living central absence, not only of a centre, but the sources that used to rise from that centre.

The exhaustion of burnout always recalls a previously felt internal fire, one from which our unquenchable energies once emerged. Burnout denotes a kind of amnesia: not only in the forgetting of our very personal priorities but the inability to locate a source inside us that previously seemed to run through all the seasons of our life. This loss of a fiery essential centre is also experienced as a loss of faith: a form of forgetting, not only that the source actually existed inside me in the first place but that I might not now ever remember how to drink from it again.

Not unlike existential boredom, of which it is the mirror image, burnout is a misapprehension of time, a failure to trust its ever-undulating flow toward the ever-shifting horizon of the possible. Because we are temporal creatures who only have four thousand weeks to spend our two billion allotted heartbeats, mistrusting time is mistrusting life itself. In a sentiment evocative of Wendell Berry’s celebration of the sabbath as a radical act of resistance, David writes:

Burnout always involves a loss of the timeless and therefore of the ability to rest. Burnout, in a very profound way, is a loss of friendship with time itself… the experience of feeling continually out of season… In the loss of faith in existence itself, we refuse, in a kind of symmetrical sympathy, to fully exist ourselves. Being out of season with the outside world means we also miss our own inner, creative, tidal comings and goings.

Because burnout often results from the invisible wear-and-tear of gliding along the vector of exertion toward a dream we have long outgrown, at its heart is a beckoning to conjure up that most difficult, most rewarding kind of courage — the courage to change our minds and change our lives, to break down the structure of the self in order to imagine it afresh — a process so discomposing, given our paradoxical resistance to transformation, that we may only be able to enter it through the attic of the unconscious. David writes:

Burnout calls for creative breakdown, either in submitting to unconscious self-sabotage, the way that disasters large and small seem to track our exhausted burned-out self on a daily basis, the way we actually create those disasters unknowingly ourselves, trying to make a break for freedom or to create a conscious creative breakdown. Burnout is often as much the resistance to making these changes as being worn down by what we cannot seem to change: all the ways I find it impossible to leave the job, or leave the relationship; all the ways I find it impossible to change my approach to work, or all the ways I need to simply learn to love again must be looked at and allowed to break down and fall away.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.

Observing that burnout is “a loss of friendship with a very personal sense of the unknown” — that lovely capacity for self-surprise which makes life worth living and allows us to reinvent ourselves — he adds:

Burnout fully realised is also the decisive, exhausted moment in which we realise we cannot go on in the same way.

Not being able to go on, is always in the end, a creative act, the threshold moment of our transformation away from physical exhaustion. Not being able to go on is the beginning of a proper relationship with the timeless and the healing possibilities of timelessness: healing ourselves from burnout always involves a reacquaintance with the eternal: my ability to experience the timeless is a parallel to my ability to rest.

Ultimately, burnout is the pathology of doing in the psyche of being, the only remedy for which is to rest into the primal knowledge that there was never anything to prove with all that exertion, never anything to redeem with all that punitive pursuit of your culture’s or your parents’ or your idols’ ideas about what makes a life worth living.

Echoing Willa Cather’s spare and timeless definition of happiness, David writes:

The foundation from which we transform the experience of burnout is always the realisation that we have been measuring all the wrong things in all the wrong ways and that we have for too long, mis-measured our sense of self in the same way; that we have allowed the shallow rewards of false goals or false people to mesmerise, bedazzle and entrain us: to hide from us an ancient and abiding human dynamic — that we belong to something greater and even better for us than the realm of the measured.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

Complement these fragments of the wholly revivifying Consolations II with Alain de Botton on the importance of breakdowns, Katherine May’s potent salve for burnout, and John Gardner on the art of self-renewal, then revisit David Whyte on the relationship between anxiety and intimacy and this superb Where Shall We Meet conversation with him about language and life.

BP

Birds, Loves, and Obscure Sorrows: The Best of The Marginalian 2024

Hindsight is how we connect the dots that figure our lives. To look back on even a single year is to see clearly the contour of who we are in its points of attention and priority. “How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard wrote, “is how we spend our lives.” How we spend our minds is our primary purchase on our days.

In the annual hindsight ritual of distilling the “best” of The Marginalian, here is a Venn diagram of the most read pieces and those I most loved writing, which never perfectly coincide — a lovely reminder that we read the same way we love: with ideas about what is best as different as the minds that carry them.

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An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days

Read it here.

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18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian

Read it here.

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Love Anyway

Read it here.

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Read it here.

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But We Had Music

Read it here.

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Thank You, Everything: An Illustrated Love Letter to the World

Read it here.

* * *

The Universe in Verse Book

Read it here.

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Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Read it here.

* * *

A Parliament of Owls and a Murder of Crows: How Groups of Birds Got Their Names, with Wondrous Vintage Illustrations by Brian Wildsmith

Read it here.

* * *

Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace

Read it here.

* * *

The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

Read it here.

* * *

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

Read it here.

* * *

Thich Nhat Hanh on True Love and the Five Rivers of Self-Knowledge

Read it here.

* * *

The Pleasure of Being Left Alone

Read it here.

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Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Read it here.

* * *

Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

Read it here.

* * *

Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent

Read it here.

* * *

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Read it here.

* * *

Albert Camus on How to Live Whole in a Broken World

Read it here.

* * *

Let the Last Thing Be Song

Read it here.

* * *

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

Read it here.

BP

The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration

Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizing principle — there are such times in every human life, times when the entire system seems to cave in and curl up into a catatonia of anguish and confusion, difficult yet necessary for our growth.

In such times, the most courageous thing we can do is surrender to the process that is the pause, trust the still dark place to kindle the torchlight for a new path and vitalize our forward motion toward a new system of being. The poet May Sarton knew this when she observed in her poignant reckoning with despair that “sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.” James Baldwin knew it when he contemplated how to live through your darkest hour, insisting that such times can “force a reconciliation between oneself and all one’s pain and error,” on the other side of which is a life more alive.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.)

This shift from suffering to surrender can never be willed — it can only be achieved through the willingness we call humility. That is what the influential British ethnologist and cultural anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (June 13, 1866–February 18, 1943) — a pioneer in the study of the evolutionary origins of religion — addressed in his inaugural Oxford University lecture, delivered on October 27, 1910 under the title The Birth of Humility (public domain).

Marett considers the spiritual value of such periods of suffering:

There is at work in every phase of [life] a spiritual force of alternating current; the energy flowing not only from the positive pole, but likewise from the negative pole in turn… At times, however, a vital spurt dies out, and the outlook is flat and dreary. It is at such times that there is apt to occur a counter-movement, which begins, paradoxically, in a sort of artificial prolongation and intensification of the natural despondency. Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality.

Echoing William James’s insistence that “a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity” — a radical refutation of Cartesian dualism, which science has since confirmed by revealing psychological trauma as physiological trauma and illuminating how the body and the mind converge in the healing of trauma — Marett observes that every such crisis of the spirit is a “psycho-physical crisis,” marked by “heart-sinking” and “loss of tone” in body and mind alike, and rooted in an evolutionary adaptation of our biology:

The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane. Regeneration, in fact, typically spells advance, the pauses in the rhythm of life helping successively to swell its harmony.

Marett notes that both the sacred rituals of tribal cultures and the theological doctrines of so-called civilized societies invite that painful yet regenerative pause between the poles of the spirit as a way of redirecting the current from the negative to the positive — a pause riven by fear, for the paradox of transformation is that we are always terrified of even the most propitious change, yet a pause capable of turning fear into a “spiritual lever” for reaching the next stage of spiritual development.

Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Also available as a stand-alone print and as stationery cards.)

With an eye to the “widespread human capacity to profit by the pauses in secular life which Religion seems to have sanctioned and even enforced in all periods of its history,” Marett writes:

Pause is the necessary condition of the development of all those higher purposes which make up the rational being.

[…]

Not until the days of this period of chrysalis life have been painfully accomplished can he emerge a new and glorified creature, who, by spiritual transformation, is invested alike with the dignities and the duties of [being human].

Complement with Ursula K. Le Guin on suffering and getting to the other side of pain and Oliver Sacks on despair and the meaning of life, then revisit Alexis de Tocqueville on stillness as a form of action and cataclysm as a catalyst for growth.

BP

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