Maria Popova's Blog, page 2

A Heron, a Red Leaf, and a Hole in a Blue Star: Poet Jane Kenyon on the Art of Letting Go

The vital force of life is charged by the poles of holding on and letting go. We know that the price of love is loss, and yet we love anyway; that our atoms will one day belong to generations of other living creatures who too will die in turn, and yet we press them hard against the body of the world, against each other’s bodies, against the canvas and the keyboard and the cambium of life.

This is the cruel contract of all experience, of aliveness itself — that in order to have it, we must agree...

Undersound: The Secret Lives of Ponds and the Mysterious Musicality of the World

“The book of love is full of music,” sings Peter Gabriel. “In fact, that’s where music comes from.”

The book of love is written in the language of wonder — our best means of loving life more deeply. To love anything — a person, a pond, the world — is to see the wonder in it, to hear the music in it. Both love and wonder are in mysterious conversation with the deepest substrate of us, the complete message of which is unintelligible to the analytical mind, inaccessible by any explanatory model. B...

Decoding the Mystery of Intuition: Pioneering Philosopher of AI Margaret Boden on the Three Elements of Creativity

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do [only] whatever we know how to order it to perform,” Ada Lovelace inveighed upon composing the world’s first algorithm for the world’s first computer. Meanwhile, she was reckoning with the nature of creativity, distilling it to a trinity: “an intuitive perception of hidden things,” “immense reasoning faculties,” and the “concentrative faculty” of bringing to any creative endeavor “a vast apparatus from all sorts ...

Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator

Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family. Older than great white sharks, they hunt everything from seals a tenth their size to moose bathing in the shallows to Earth’s largest animal — the blue whale, whose tongue alone can weigh as much as a female orca.

The secret to these staggering feats is not brute f...

Rewilding the Human Spirit in the Age of Moral Colonialism: Brian Eno on Carnival as a Model for Saving Culture

The prisons we choose to live inside hardly ever look like prisons while we are living in them.

If the twentieth century was the age of dictatorships — I grew up in one — reducing human beings to a herd, the twenty-first century, with its self-appointed moral despots, is the age of the tyranny of the herd itself. Having invented a merciless weapon of individual destruction — the pitchfork of the cancel mob — we are now doing to human nature what we have already done to nature, turning a biodive...

Dawn: A Watercolor Ode to the Primeval Conversation Between Our Living Planet and Its Dying Star

“You have found an intermediate space… where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his transcendent portrait of the transition from sleep to wakefulness. The experience of waking — that phase transition between the liquid phantasmagoria of the unconscious and the solidity of conscious life — reveals the mind to itself. “All the world is mind,” the teenage Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. To watch the world come awake is to contact the essence ...

Wonder, Play, and How to Be More Alive

We build our lives around structures of certainty — houses to live in, marriages to love in, ideologies to think in — and yet some primal part of us knows that none abides, knows that we pay for these comforting illusions with our very aliveness.

Wonder — that edge state on the rim of understanding, where the mind touches mystery — is our best means of loving the world more deeply. It asks of us the courage of uncertainty because it is a form of deep play and play, unlike games, is inherently op...

Things Become Other Things: Walking, Forgiveness, and Belonging in the Mountains of Japan

Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step in space is also a step in time, slicing through the twilight between the half-fathomed past and the unfathomed future — a verse in the poetry of prospection. We walk the world to discover it and in th...

Blink Twice to Quell a Quasar: Carl Sagan on Superstition

Growing up in Bulgaria, in a city teeming in stray dogs and cars, I was deeply distressed by the sight of each dead animal in the streets between home and school — deaths I could not prevent and could not bear. To cope with the aching helplessness, I developed a private superstition: If I touched each of the vertical bars on every fence along my walk, no dog would die. Sometimes I ran to touch as many bars as possible in as little time as possible, the impact bruising and callusing my fingers. D...

How to Be a Happier Creature

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world.

Even as the merchants of silicon and ...