Some magic

I'm a big fan of Maria Popova, who writes/edits and produces a weekly inspirational literary column, "The Marginalian."

 "To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.

Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.

Maria Popova, "The Marginalian"

Here's a free video of "The Universe in Verse."  It may not be available after a certain date. 

SEASON 5: APRIL 16, 2022 (SANTA CRUZ, CA)

For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, I joined forces with my astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha (who led NASA’s Kepler and its triumphant discovery of more than 4,000 potential cradles for life beyond Earth, and now heads an inspired astrobiology initiative as her work on the search for life continues at UC Santa Cruz) to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.

In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season below, who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie).

All proceeds from the show were split halfway between a new scholarship at UCSC, honoring the life and legacy of astronomer and search-for-life pioneer Frank Drake, and The Nature Conservancy, whose tireless work stewards and protects the broadest community of life across our own irreplaceable world.