It is an odd thing, looking back on your life, trying to recognize in the mirror of memory the people you used to be, finding them strangers: the person who kissed your first kiss, the person who drank your last drink, the person who had your best idea, the person who made your worst mistake, the person who over and over mistook fear for love, the person who thought orange was a good idea. Somehow, you have to grow arms long enough to wrap them around all those people and a heart wide enough to hold each of them with quiet compassion. Somehow, you have to both mourn and celebrate that you were them but they are no longer you.
It has been an odd thing, looking back on twenty years of The Marginalian — the record of half a lifetime of learning how to live. It called for a ritual — to honor those past persons, to celebrate the constant reconfiguration of the self.
And so: I took the first page of each of the first twenty chapters of my first book, Figuring — who wrote that book? — beginning with the prelude (Chapter 0), and applied my bird divination process to the text, letting the words refigure themselves into something new, something I have learned about life along the way of living, some piece of advice I needed to hear whispered by my own unconscious. The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry. And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.
Enlisting the help of two of my greatest teachers — clay, which is constantly teaching me how to hold on while letting go and how to say “YES” to life, and lichen, which has a great deal to teach us about loneliness, patience, and resilience — I made twenty ceramic bowls glazed in the color scheme of The Marginalian, with some blue for its existential value and its lens on the universe, and I cast the words in them with resin over lichen from places I have lived over the years, from Bulgaria to Patagonia.
To celebrate the monumental role chance plays in any given life, without which none of us would be who we are, or here at all, I am giving these away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle: To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you by December 31, so long as you end it with the decimal .20. (The loveliness of a lottery, which is an antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of an auction, is that your odds are equal whether you enter with $1.20 or $10,000.20 — the only difference is by how much you support this ongoing labor of love.)
donating = loving
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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