Maria Popova's Blog, page 75

My God, It’s Full of Stars: Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe (Tracy K. Smith Reads Tracy K. Smith)

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

This is the second of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. Here is Chapter 1 (the evolution of flowers and the birth of ecology, with Emily Dickinson).

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER TWOHenrietta Swan Leavitt

In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard ...

My God, It’s Full of Stars: An Animated Serenade to Hubble and Our Human Hunger to Know the Universe

“…so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

This is the second of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being. Here is Chapter 1.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER TWOHenrietta Swan Leavitt

In 1908, Henrietta Swan Leavitt — one of the women known as the Harvard Computers, who changed our understanding of the universe long befor...

Rebecca Solnit on Trees and the Shape of Time

“Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.”

Two hundred and two years after Walt Whitman’s birth, I traveled to the granite emblem of his life and death. Standing sentinel across from the tomb’s entrance are two towering trees — something the poet, who likened his most beloved friend to a tree, would have appreciated. Saplings when the tomb was built, their granite-colored bark is now scarred with the names of g...

Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology (Joan As Police Woman Sings Emily Dickinson)

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”

This is the first of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry.

THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER ONE

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and du...

Bloom: The Evolution of Life on Earth and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson Set to Song

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”

This is the first of nine installments in the 2021/2022 animated season of The Universe in Verse — a celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry, in collaboration with On Being.

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea ...

The Animated Universe in Verse, Part 1: The Origin of Life and the Birth of Ecology, with Emily Dickinson

How flowers gave rise to life on Earth and made possible the human consciousness that came to see a world “thronged only with Music.”

The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on science and the natural world in an atmosphere of “alternative facts” and vanishing ecological protections) and part persistence (in sustaining the felicitous expression of nature in human n...

Pattern, Perspective, and Trust: Barry Lopez on Storytelling

“It is through story… that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.”

We are self-contradictory creatures moving through a discontinuous world, glimpsing only fragments of reality. The hallmark of our species, the cost of living inside a consciousness so elaborate yet so self-limited, is that we know all this and yet we hunger for cohesion, for continuity, for pattern.

We ca...

For Warmth: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetic Antidote to Anger

How to keep your soul from leaving you.

“The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands,” the poet and storyteller turned activist Grace Paley’s father told her in what remains the finest advice on growing older. “You must do this every morning.”

Meanwhile, the Vietnamese Zen monk and peace activist turned poet Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022), just a few years younger than Paley, was channeling a kindred sentiment into one ...

The Light That Bridges the Dark Expanse Between Lonelinesses: James Baldwin on How Long-Distance Love Illuminates the Power of All Love

“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving ...

Highlights in Hindsight: Favorite Books of the Past Year

Trees, hummingbirds, snails, Stoicism, storytelling, Orwell’s roses, the crucible of consciousness, the end of the universe, and more trees.

I used to assemble annual reading lists of favorite books published each year — never an objective claim of bests, always a subjective inner library catalogue of my readings and rivets. But over the years, as I grew more and more interested in the river of thought and time that has carved out the island of now, I found myself spending more and more time i...