Reads by Maria Popova
Between Science and Magic: How Hummingbirds Hover at the Edge of the Possible
How a tiny creature faster than the Space Shuttle balances the impossible equation of extreme fragility and superhuman strength.
Tracing the Roots of the Big Apple: The Mysterious Origins of the World’s Most Famous City Moniker
A working theory of grafting Eden.
The Woman Who Saved the Hawks: Redeeming an Overlooked Pioneer of Conservation
The story of the countercultural courage and persistence that shaped the modern ecological conscience.
Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise
“Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil.”
Our Cosmic Humanity: Astronomer Jill Tarter Reads Nobel-Winning Polish Poet Wisława Szymborska
“…as long as our kindness is still incomparable, peerless even in its imperfection…”
Keith Haring on Creativity, Empathy, and What Makes Us Who We Are
“The need to separate ourselves and connect ourselves to our environment (world) is a primary need of all human beings.”
Waking Up: David Whyte on the Power of Poetry and Silence as Portal to Presence
“The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence… in order for you to perceive something other than yourself… Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create silence.”
Love and Symmetry: Poet A. Van Jordan Imagines the Undelivered Feynman Lecture About the Mystery Lying Between Scientific Truth and Human Meaning
“Mysteries inside mysteries in our own bodies of which we can’t make sense, another world waiting for a religion or calculus to explain.”
The Spirituality of Science and the Wonder of the Wilderness: Ornithologist and Wildlife Ecologist J. Drew Lanham on Nature as Worship
“As I wander into the predawn dark of an autumn wood, I feel the presence of things beyond flesh, bone, and blood. My being expands to fit the limitlessness of the wild world.”
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