show up for goodness and refuse to leave.   I read and keep your essays. I learn and cherish your endeavor.  I now contribute.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts about Proust....

Well spoken Maria, combining the old and new means of communication.

You keep saying "her work?" I'm sorry, what work?

Interestingness Cross-Pollinated, that is a great description.

This ... "Infected with pathological impatience, we want knowledge, and the true material of knowledge is meaning, and the meaningful is the opposite of the trivial. So the only thing we gain by being impatient, by skimming and skipping ahead is really trivia. The only way to gain knowledge is through contemplation, which takes time, there is no shortcut for the conquest of knowledge. Meaning is what we seek for lives, it just takes time."

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/05/28/emily-dickinson-grief/

POEM TEXT / CONTEXT

"I measure every Grief I meet" (Maria Popova reads Emily Dickinson)

Context and illustrations: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/11/10/love-at-first-sight-szymborska-queirazza/

CONTEXT

"Love at First Sight" by Wisława Szymborska (read by Maria Popova)

Poem text and context: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/05/20/ada-limon-dead-stars/

Music: Bach Cello Suite No. 4 in E Flat, performed by Seraband Bourree (public domain)

"Dead Stars" by Ada Limón

Landau

Mary Oliver reads from her exquisite collection 'Blue Horses.' Background, poem text, and context here: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/02/09/mary-oliver-blue-horses-fourth-sign-of-the-zodiac/

Excerpted from https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/sets/mary-oliver-listening-to-the

MORE/TEXT

Mary Oliver reads from Blue Horses

She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We meet Maria Popova at 30, and explore her gleanings, thus far, on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age/7580

Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital World

The final moments of an hour-long piano improvisation in Port Meadow, Oxford. Released for #PianoDay 2016. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1CVLS0-ZYI&feature=youtu.be 

Duck

@AmandaPalmer reads Jane Kenyon's sublime poem of living with and through depression. Originally recorded for Brain Pickings. Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/27/having-it-out-with-melancholy-jane-kenyon-amanda-palmer/

September 27, 2017

Amanda Palmer reads "Having It Out With Melancholy" by Jane Kenyon

Ambient cello jam, waiting for the northern lights to appear in Iceland, Dec 2016

Xulerenam

Kindly recorded by the author for Brain Pickings. Poem text and context:  https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/01/08/what-you-need-to-be-warm-neil-gaiman

Neil Gaiman reads "What You Need to Be Warm"

Score I wrote using 20 layers of legato strings, performed on the Viola Da Gamba. This was a piece that never made the final cut of a film I was working on in 2020.

Layers - Viola Da Gamba Sketch

Groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning conversation about the big questions of meaning, hosted by Krista Tippett. Every Thursday a new discovery about the immensity of our lives — and frequent special features like poetry, music and Q + A with Krista.

Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital World

On Being Studios

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