Maya Angelou on Writing and Our Responsibility to Our Creative Gifts

“Be a good steward of your gifts,” the poet Jane Kenyon urged in what remains some of the finest advice on writing and life ever committed to words.

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May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

The matter that we know — the stuff we can see and touch — comprises a mere 5% of the universe. All the rest is dark matter. We can’t see it, can’t touch it, can’t discern what it is made of or how it came to be.

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The Remedy for Creative Block and Existential Stuckness

To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem, a garden — is not to will something new into being but to surrender to the most ancient and alive part of ourselves — the stratum of spirit vibrating with every experience we have ever had, every book we have ever read, every love we have eve

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May Sarton on How to Cultivate Your Talent

There is a reason we call our creative endowments gifts — they come to us unbidden from an impartial universe, dealt by the unfeeling hand of chance.

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How to Survive Hopelessness

Dougal Robertson (January 29, 1924–September 22, 1991) was still a teenager, the youngest of a Scottish music teacher’s eight children, when he joined the British Merchant Navy.

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Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination

We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.

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Psychedelics Open Your Brain. You Might Not Like What Falls In.

Reshaping your mind isn’t always a great idea. If you’ve ever been to London, you know that navigating its wobbly grid, riddled with curves and dead-end streets, requires impressive spatial memory.

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The Vital Difference Between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit

It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work does, dishwashing or dentistry.

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Nick Cave on the Antidote to Our Existential Helplessness

We live between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, incapable of touching either, irrelevant to the fate of both.

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Music and the Price of What We Cherish: Margaret Atwood on the Bonds and Obligations of Creative Gifts

A decade ago, several years after I started writing The Marginalian (under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, in my twenties, while working four jobs), a musician friend gave me a book she said captured the animating spirit of my labor of love: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (

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