Maria Popova's Blog, page 30

We Are the Music, We Are the Spark: Pioneering Biologist Ernest Everett Just on What Makes Life Alive

“Life is exquisitely a time-thing, like music.”

This is the great bewilderment: that out of a cold austere cosmos arose the roiling wonder of life, from the tiniest archaeans that have “confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed” to the cathedral of consciousness ringing with music and mathematics and poems about archaeans; that we are here trembling with all this love and all this suffering, all these vicissitudes of aliveness, and all the while each one of the atoms in our bodie...

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 vi...

What Books Give Us: Hermann Hesse on Reading 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 whi...

Favorite Children’s Books of 2023

Tender and poetic reckonings with friendship, fear, love, solitude, black holes, deep time, and the interconnectedness of life.

Great children’s books are works of philosophy in disguise — gifts of wonder and consolation not only for the very young, but for the eternal child in each of us, conferring upon us what Maurice Sendak called “the pleasure of having your child self intact and alive and something to be proud of.” In the language of children — the language of curiosity and unselfconsciou...

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.

Art by Viol...

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 visi...

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.”

Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary — only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ...

The Sky and the Soul: 19th-Century Norwegian Artist Knud Baade’s Transcendent Cloudscapes

Nothing on Earth appears more divine yet attests more fully to the materiality of being than clouds — enchanting emblems of the water cycle that makes this rocky planet a living world, drifting across our shared dome as if exhaled by some lovesick god. That we should have such a ready supply of wonder hovering above us at all times is one of those daily mercies never to be taken for granted.

Like trees, clouds are sovereign wonders, but they are also mirrors — silver-lined portals to contemplati...

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...

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.”

Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter someone with such powerful and generous light in their eyes that they rekindle the lost light within you and return it magnified; someone whose calm, kind, steady gaze penetrates the very center of your being and, refusing to look away from even the most shadowy parts of you, falls upon you like a bened...