Maria Popova

Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Stephen Hawking wondered, recognizing the quixotic nature of his quest for a theory of everything — a complete and final explanation of the universe, a universe only rendered real in the mind.

Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who existed in the margins of their time and place. (That is why

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But

“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in . “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.”

One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the feeling-tone in my body, the strange and lovely simultaneity of absolute presence and absolute peace. I didn't yet know the word for transcendence.

The summer I turned forty, my grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and extraordinary passion, may have taken less time had she not needed to supplement her paltry elementary schoolteacher income by tilling potato fields and pruning plum trees in rural Bulgaria. Born in the final years of the sovereign monarchy Bulgaria briefly enjoyed after five centuries of Ottoman occupation, she had worked on her embroidery in the middle of the Communist dictatorship that had begun when she was five and would last until I was five. Denied university admission on account of her family's opposition to the regime, my grandmother never strained a single synapse on higher mathematics, yet her embroidery exudes the elegant simplicity of a great theorem — a living affirmation of trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell's insistence on

Beneath our anxious quickenings, beneath our fanged fears, beneath the rusted armors of conviction, tenderness is what we long for — tenderness to

This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass

It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom how things cohere and where they belong, a yearning we have given shape to in laws and labels, weights and balances, hierarchies and categories. It has served us well, this instinct to categorize in order to contain, giving us music, the laws of planetary motion, and democracy. But it also pulsates beneath every ism we have ever invented, beneath every stereotype and every genocide, beneath every algorithm that reduces us to variables then adds them up to sell the sum of who we are, beneath all the parcels of preconception we trade daily and mistake the barter a for a genuine encounter with one another.