Maria Popova's Blog, page 107

Wander: Natascha McElhone Reads Hermann Hesse’s 100-Year-Old Love Letter to Trees in a Virtual Mental Health Walk Through Kew Gardens

In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.

In the final years of his life, the great neurologist Oliver Sacks reflected on the physiological and psychological healing power of nature, observing that in forty...

And So It Goes: A Lyrical Illustrated Meditation on the Cycle of Life

We dont know when, but those who arrive will leave one day as well.

What is it then between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us? asked Walt Whitman in his iconic ode to the unstoppable succession of being as he contemplated the generations who, long after he has returned his borrowed atoms to the universe, would walk the same streets and traverse the same waters and burn with the same human passions. Half a century down this generational river, Rilke insisted...

Beyond the Blues: Poet Mary Ruefle’s Stunning Color Spectrum of Sadnesses

Pink sadness is the sadness of shame when you have done nothing wrong, pink sadness is not your fault, and though even the littlest twinge may cause it, it is the vast bushy top on the family tree of sadness, whose faraway roots resemble a colossal squid with eyes the size of soccer balls.

There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos, Paul Goodman wrote half a...

Drawings by Children: Rosanne Cash Reads Lisel Mueller’s Subtle Poem About Growing Out of Our Limiting Frames of Reference

There is nothing behind the wall except a space where the wind whistles, but you cannot see that.

We parse and move through reality as multidimensional creatures in a multidimensional world. The experience of dimensions, this living fact of spatiality, may be our most direct mathematical grasp of the universe an understanding woven into our elemental sensemaking, into our language and our metaphors: We speak of our social circles, our love triangles, our spheres of influence, the depth of...

Conscience in Revolt: Sophie Scholl on Suffering, Strength, and the Deepest Wellspring of Courage

Sympathy is often difficult and soon becomes hollow if one feels no pain oneself.

To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart thats what life is all about, thats its task, the young Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in an existential exhale of a letter to his brother hours after his death sentence was repealed; in 1849, still in his twenties, Dostoyevsky had been arrested and sentenced to death for...

The Cosmic Miracle of Trees: Astronaut Leland Melvin Reads Pablo Neruda’s Love Letter to Earth’s Forests

Anyone who hasnt been in the Chilean forest doesnt know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world.

Today, for some, a universe will vanish, Jane Hirshfield writes in her stunning poem about the death of a tree a quarter millennium after William Blake observed in his most passionate letter that how we see a tree is how we see the world, and in the act of seeing we reveal what we are: The tree which moves some to tears of...

Physicist Brian Greene on Mortality, Our Search for Meaning, and the Most Important Fact of the Universe

When you see all of those stories nested together in one narrative arc it gives a deeper understanding of where we came from, and whats happening at the moment, and ultimately where were going.

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in letter to his grief-stricken friend, the Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, in 1923 the year he published, after a decade of work,...

Singularity: Marie Howe’s Ode to Stephen Hawking, Our Cosmic Belonging, and the Meaning of Home, in a Stunning Animated Short Film

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember?

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet, Maya Angelou begins A Brave and Startling Truth her cosmic wakeup call to humanity, which flew into space aboard NASAs Orion spacecraft and which opened the 2018 Universe in Verse, dedicated to our ecological awakening on the wings of Rachel Carsons courageous work.

That year, Marie Howe one of our great living poets, who awakens the creaturely conscience of the next generation...

A Lifeline for the Hour of Despair: James Baldwin on 4AM, the Fulcrum of Love, and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.

Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of lifes most haunting hour. But what we find in that intermediate space between past and future, between the costumed...

Brokenness as Belonging: “lake-loop” by Mojave American Poet Natalie Diaz, in a Stunning Animated Short Film by Artist Ohara Hale

Every story is a story of water.

In February 2019, Lake Erie became a person. After local residents banded together to compose a visionary bill of rights for the lakes ecosystem, defending its right to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve, it was granted personhood in the eyes of the law. It was an ancient recognition native cultures have always recognized the animacy of the land disguised as a radical piece of policy. It was also the single most poetic piece of legislature since the...