books

What It’s Like to Be an Owl: The Strange Science of Seeing with Sound

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals,” the great nature writer Henry Beston wrote in his lovely century-old meditation on otherness and the web of life. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” In the century since, we have come to unravel some of the wonders of the non-human sensorium — from the tetrachromatic vision of bees to the choral communication of migrating birds to the magnificent… read article …

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Hermann Hesse on What Books Give Us and the Heart of Wisdom

Books show us what it is like to be another and at the same time return us to ourselves. We read to learn how to live — how to love and how to suffer, how to grieve and how to be glad. We read to clarify ourselves and to anneal our values. We read for the assurance that others have lived through what we are living through. “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin reflected in his most personal interview. And yet while books may give… read article …

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Favorite Books of 2023

To look back on a year of reading is to be handed a clear mirror of your priorities and passions, of the questions that live in you and the reckonings that keep you up at night. While the literature of the present comprises only a tiny fraction of my own reading, here are a handful of books published this year that moved me with their tendrils of timelessness, with their questions and their consolations — selections neither exhaustive nor universal, as subjective as a shade of blue. THE HALF KNOWN LIFE “The mind is its own place, and in it… read article …

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Working Out, Working In: Applying the Six Principles of Athletic Training to Writing and Creative Work

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, or what we might call soul. And yet the great paradox is that the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self… read article …

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The Power of a Thin Skin

“To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.” …

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How the Sea Came to Be: An Illustrated Singsong Celebration of the Evolution of Life on Our Pale Blue Dot

“Who has known the ocean? Neither you nor I, with our earth-bound senses,” Rachel Carson wrote in the pioneering 1937 essay that invited the human imagination into the science and splendor of the marine world for the first time — a world then more mysterious than the Moon, a world that makes of Earth the Pale Blue Dot that it is. In the near-century since, we have made great strides in illuminating the wonderland of the sea — from the birth of sonar and the revelations of the first submersibles to our ongoing discoveries of astonishing sea creatures. And yet… read article …

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How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us

“The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.” …

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Poetic Ecology and the Biology of Wonder

“The real disconnect is not between our human nature and all the other beings; it is between our image of our nature and our real nature.” …

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In the Dark: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Find the Light Behind the Fear

The mind is a camera obscura constantly trying to render an image of reality on the back wall of consciousness through the pinhole of awareness, its aperture narrowed by our selective attention, honed on our hopes and fears. In consequence, the projection we see inside the dark chamber is not raw reality but our hopes and fears magnified — a rendering not of the world as it is but as we are: frightened, confused, hopeful creatures trying to make sense of the mystery that enfolds us, the mystery that we are. This reality-warping begins as the frights and fantasies of… read article …

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The Mind in the Machine: John von Neumann, the Inception of AI, and the Limits of Logic

“Something very small, so tiny and insignificant as to be almost invisible in its origin, can nonetheless open up a new and radiant perspective, because through it a higher order of being is trying to express itself.” …

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Giveaway: Win a 2024 Day-to-Day Calendar, Gratitude Journal, and More!

Hi friends! To celebrate the holiday season, I’m running a special giveaway today. Two people (US only) will win a bundle including Tiny Buddha’s 2024 Day-to-Cay Calendar, Tiny Buddha’s Gratitude Journal, and Tiny Buddha’s Guide to Loving Yourself.
Uplifting and healing, this calendar offers daily reflections from me, Tiny Buddha contributors, and other authors whose quotes have inspired and encouraged me.
Featuring colorful, patterned tear-off pages, the calendar is printed on FSC certified paper with soy-based ink. Topics include happiness, love, relationships, change, meaning, mindfulness, self-care, letting go, and more.
Here’s what Amazon reviewers had to say … …

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Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag lamented in her diary. “Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!” the founding father of neuroscience exulted in considering the ideal environment for creative breakthrough. All creative people, however public or performative their work may be, yearn for that contemplative space where the mind quiets and the spirit quickens. The ongoing challenge of the creative life is how to balance the outward sharing of one’s gift with the inward stewardship of the soul from which that gift springs. How to master that delicate balance is what Dutch… read article …

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The Necessity of Our Illusions: Oliver Sacks on the Mind as an Escape Artist from Reality

“We need detachment… as much as we need engagement in our lives… transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear.” …

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Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go.” …

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A Tender Illustrated Celebration of the Many Languages of Love

That one mind can reach out from its lonely cave of bone and touch another, express its joys and sorrows to another — this is the great miracle of being alive together. The object of human communication is not the exchange of information but the exchange of understanding. If we are lucky enough, if we are attentive enough, communication then becomes a system for the transfer of tenderness. That we have invented so many forms of it — the language of words, the language of music, the language of flowers — is a testament to our elemental need for this… read article …

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Turning from Peril to Possibility: Ecological Superhero Christiana Figueres on the Spirituality of Regeneration

Few things have maimed the spirit of Western civilization more than the myth of our expulsion from the Garden of Eden — a deeply damaging story about human nature, damning us and our relationship to nature. Unthinkingly, we have perpetuated this story in our present narrative about our ecological predicament: The realities of climate change are measurable and menacing, but each time our mainstream narrative elevates peril over possibility, we are doing our own damning. To invert the narrative is more than a countercultural act of courage and resistance — it is nothing less than a benediction. That is what… read article …

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The Work of Wonder: Phillip Glass on Art, Science, and the Most Important Quality of a Visionary

Epoch after epoch, we humans have tried to raise ourselves above other animals with distinctions that have turned out false — consciousness is not ours alone, nor is grief, nor is play. If there is anything singular about us, it is our capacity to be wonder-smitten by the world and to invent languages for channeling that wonder — the wonder of the inner world, the language for which is art, and the wonder of the outer world, the language of which is science. Binding the two and translating between them is the crowning glory of our consciousness: music. How these… read article …

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May Sarton on Generosity

“Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you,” Annie Dillard wrote in her beautiful essay on generosity. “You open your safe and find ashes.” I feel this truth deeply, daily — for nearly two decades of offering these writings freely, I have lived by the generosity of strangers. It is especially gratifying to perpetuate the spirit of generosity if you have arrived at the ability to do so by way of struggle and privation. No one takes more joy in giving than those who come from little. That is what the philosopher-poet May Sarton (May 3,… read article …

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The Lost Drop: An Illustrated Celebration of the Wonder of the Water Cycle and the Interconnected Ongoingness of Life

I remember when I first learned about the water cycle, about how it makes of our planet a living world and binds the fate of every molecule to that of every other. I remember feeling in my child-bones the profound interconnectedness of life as I realized I was breathing the breath of Aristotle and William Blake and Marie Curie, those exact molecules still lingering in the water vapor comprising the atmosphere that makes the whole world breathe — a living testament to Lynn Margulis’s observation that “the fact that we are connected through space and time shows that life is… read article …

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bell hooks on Love

“We can never go back… We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago… All awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” …

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From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation

We were never promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are — creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope. A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic… read article …

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The Warped Side of Our Universe: A Painted Epic Poem about the Dazzling Science of Spacetime

The first English use of the word space to connote the cosmic expanse appears in line 650 of Book I of Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost: “Space may produce new Worlds,” he wrote, and grow rife with them. In the centuries since Milton, who lived through the golden dawn of telescopic astronomy and traveled to Italy to look through Galileo’s telescope, our understanding of space has changed profoundly — it is no longer the ethereal blank of religious cosmogonies but a fabric of energy and matter laced with forces, a fabric the warp thread of which is time. This hammock… read article …

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Alain de Botton on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind

“A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going.” …

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Starlings and the Magic of Murmurations: A Stunning Watercolor Celebration of One of Earth’s Living Wonders

Biking back to my rented cottage from CERN one autumn evening, having descended into the underworld of matter for a visit to the world’s largest high-energy particle collider, a sight stopped me up short on the shore of Lake Geneva: In the orange sky over the orange water, a million particles were swarming in unison without colliding. Except they were not particles — they were birds. Millions of them. A murmuration of starlings — swarm intelligence at its most majestic, emergence incarnate, a living reminder that the universe is “nothing but a vast, self-organizing, complex system, the emergent properties of… read article …

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Yellow Butterfly: A Moving Wordless Story About War, Hope, and Keeping the Light Alive

In his little-known correspondence with Freud about war and human nature, Einstein observed that every great moral and spiritual leader in the history of our civilization has shared “the great goal of the internal and external liberation of man* from the evils of war” as Freud insisted that the more we understand human psychology, the more we can “deduce a formula for an indirect method of eliminating war.” In her timeless treatise on the building blocks of peace, the pioneering crystallographer and peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale located that formula in the moral education of our young — in teaching children,… read article …

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To Be a Person: Jane Hirshfield’s Playful and Poignant Poem About Bearing Our Human Condition

“To be a person may be possible then, after all.” …

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