Maria Popova

Summary

Design Matters with Debbie Millman

Episode: Maria Popova
Date: June 22, 2026
Podcast: Design Matters with Debbie Millman
Theme: The Art of Meaning—Maria Popova on Wonder, Mortality, and How We Make Sense of Life

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Episode Overview

In this richly philosophical conversation, Debbie Millman welcomes back Maria Popova—writer, literary curator, and creator of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings)—for an exploration into creativity, curiosity, mortality, and the intertwining of science and poetry. Reflecting on two decades of public writing, Maria unpacks the evolution of her thinking: from her childhood in Bulgaria, through the origins of her pioneering website, to her expansive, interdisciplinary books and poetry.

Themes of wonder, the search for meaning, creative process, mortality, and the ever-porous boundaries between science, art, selfhood, and the cosmos are woven throughout. Maria reads two new poems on air, shares the genesis of several projects, and discusses how the interplay between intellect and feeling shapes not only her work but the very fabric of being human.

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Main Discussion Themes & Insights

1. The Imprisonment of Self and the Value of Wonder

• Maria opens with a sharp statement about the limitations of self-obsession:

  "The self is such a tedious place. We live in it, and especially in our culture, where people lead with identities and opinions, which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self." (00:01)

• Recurring to the idea of “unselfing” (inspired by Iris Murdoch) as an essential occasion for experiencing real wonder (54:16).

2. Origin Story: From Bulgaria to Marginalian

• Briefly revisiting her early years under communism and immigrant struggles in the U.S.
• The journey from a newsletter for friends to "Brain Pickings" and eventually “The Marginalian,” emphasizing a stubborn determination to build “another table” rather than accept offered options (10:35).
• She describes the first version of her site as “the ugliest website in the world.” (11:49)
• Motivation: A desire to connect, synthesize, and create meaning outside the academic and commercial status quo.
• On moving beyond superficial advertising-based models:

  "My faith in humanity. Fundamentally, people are generous and hungry for meaning. You can't sell meaning." (13:41)

3. Combinatorial Creativity and Intellectual Curiosity

• Reiterates her worldview that creativity is the act of recombination:

  “This kind of aggregation, combination, that is creation.” (06:21)

• View of creativity as a universal mental process, not an exclusive domain of artists or ‘creatives.’

4. Slowness, Depth, and Resisting Clickbait

• The Marginalian stands as a refuge from hot takes—deliberately slow, thoughtful, and anti-algorithmic (12:40).
• Maria insists on never compromising the site's values for monetization or popularity.

5. The Shift from Brain Pickings to The Marginalian

• Change reflects moving beyond a “cheap pun” and a youthful focus on brain and mind:

  “I was just disgusted with this very cheap pun... I have been very influenced... by people who existed in the margins of their time and place... because they were already other in some way, they had... self permission and freedom to think in ways others didn't...” (15:02)

6. Mortality, Meaning, and Making Art

• Discussion around Maria’s first book "Figuring" and its existential themes: “We make art to try to bear our mortality.” (21:05)
• Engages with the idea that both love and creativity are responses to the limits of existence:

  “Every love story is a tragic story. Because every love ends with a loss... There's no eternal love because there is no eternity allotted us.” (22:24)

7. Research as Empathy and Absorption

• On deep-dive research into lives like Whitman, Douglass, Mary Shelley:

  "Spending seven years with Mary Shelley and Whitman, they taught me how to see, they taught me how to feel... I feel this tremendous absence and grief. It's like a real person left." (24:50)

8. Children’s Books: Making Science Emotional

• Maria’s children’s books are “works of philosophy in disguise,” using scientific curiosities as metaphors for existential truths (32:52).
• Example: The Snail with the Right Heart as both a story of biological anomaly and a meditation on belonging (30:13).

9. Evolution of Form: From Essays to Poetry

• Maria’s late conversion to poetry, sparked by the mentorship of Emily Levine:

  “She took it upon herself to educate me in poetry... and I started seeing how poetry and science are these side doors to the same reality, to befriending reality.” (36:48)

• Reads two original poems: Corrective for a Broken Heart (starts 39:37) and The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet (64:41).

10. Science, Poetry, and Collective Ritual

• Her live project The Universe in Verse pairs poetry with scientific storytelling. Born in protest against “alternative facts,” it became a communal act of meaning-making (43:08).
• Argues for the artificiality and harm of the mind/body, intellect/feeling split:

  “Descartes is the most damaging man in the history of our species... There’s no clear demarcation between thought and feeling. Feeling is an instrument of thinking.” (45:11)

11. Birds, Dreams, and Making Meaning

• Describes creating An Almanac of Birds, an "anti-tarot deck" of bird-inspired poems and divinations, blending ornithology, dreams, and collage (46:25–53:45).
• Emphasis on creative constraint, the power of the unconscious, and the idea that “anything you polish with attention becomes a mirror” (53:45).

12. Omens, Pattern Recognition, and Meaning-Making

• Distinguishes between “omens” (meaning we choose to confer) and signs (supposedly external messages):

  “Omens are internally generated... We have to make sense of what is happening to us... The crux of consciousness is that we interpret and give story and give meaning.” (57:54–58:57)

13. On Impermanence and Enoughness

• Reckoning with extinction, erasure, and impermanence:

  “I think the desire for permanence or immortality... is a rather destructive desire to have it all... The task of life is to have enough.” (63:14)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Wonder and Unselfing:

  “Our most rewarding experiences... Wonder is only possible in a moment of unselfing.” —Maria Popova (54:14)

• On Non-Commercial Creativity:

  “Why would I perpetrate [clickbait] on other people? If I'm making something in the world, why not make the world we want to live in?” —Maria Popova (12:40)

• On Art and Mortality:

  “If we were not mortal, we would not make art. We wouldn't.” —Maria Popova (21:05)

• On the Limits of Self:

  “The self is such a tedious place... it's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.” —Maria Popova (00:01 & 54:14)

• On Love as Meaning:

  “What is life? What is death? What makes a planet a world? The answer may simply be love.” —Debbie Millman paraphrasing Maria (56:00) “I think love is an instrument for how to [make meaning].” —Maria Popova (56:33)

• On Omens and Meaning:

  “Omens are internally generated. We are pattern recognizing animals. Much of what is happening is randomness, but we need to create a pattern... that's not just a byproduct—it's the crux of consciousness.” —Maria Popova (57:54)

• On Making a Difference:

  “We can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both.” —Debbie Millman (66:09)

• On Keeping the World Open:

  “More wonder, less certainty.” —Maria Popova (64:12)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:01–00:51 — Maria on the imprisonment of self; what dreaming allows us
• 04:06 — Introduction of Maria Popova’s biography and body of work
• 06:21 — Creativity as combinatorial process; worldview
• 07:03–13:41 — Origins of Brain Pickings/Marginalian; resisting online speed and advertising
• 14:53 — Name change from Brain Pickings to Marginalian; influence of people from the margins
• 17:37–20:59 — What keeps Maria motivated; writing and themes of "Figuring"; mortality
• 23:23–25:30 — Research process; creative empathy and “missing” her biographical subjects
• 26:52 — The comfort of choosing your dead as subjects versus unpredictability of the living
• 29:15–32:52 — Writing children’s books that are philosophical, e.g. The Snail with the Right Heart
• 36:48–41:06 — Discovery and writing of poetry; reading Corrective for a Broken Heart
• 43:08–45:21 — The Universe in Verse event; science, poetry, and collective meaning
• 46:25–53:45 — Creation of An Almanac of Birds; birds, dreams, divination
• 54:16–55:35 — Unselfing, unconscious, therapy, and self-awareness
• 56:32–59:40 — Traversal, love as cosmological, omens and pattern recognition
• 61:47–63:14 — Curiosity, optimism, and impermanence
• 64:12–65:59 — Final poem The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet and closing reflections

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Maria Popova’s Poems (on air)

Corrective for a Broken Heart (39:37)

"Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken?
It still beats, doesn’t it?
... We are here to lose our way."

The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet (64:41)

"You wouldn't have bet on it.
The battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe
wouldn't have guessed that it would bloom mitochondria and music...
How it hovers over everything gigantic and unnecessary, like music, like love."

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Conclusion: Takeaway for Listeners

Maria Popova’s enduring project is to rescue meaning from fragmentation, both personal and collective. Through rigorous inquiry, radical curiosity, and poetic empathy, she weaves science and art, intellect and feeling, into a unified exploration of what it means to be alive—and how we might do so with greater “wonder and less certainty.” For anyone seeking purpose and depth in a fleeting, fractured world, this conversation is an open invitation.

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For further reading:

• themarginalian.org
• Traversal (Maria’s latest book)
• Design Matters podcast archives

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Transcript

[Maria Popova]

I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it and especially in our culture where people lead with identities and opinions which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.

[Narrator]

From the TED Audio Collective this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a wide ranging conversation with Maria Popova about science and poetry, about how to make meaning in an indifferent universe, and about the value of dreaming.

[Maria Popova]

How incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible.

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[Debbie Millman]

Maria Popova is a writer and reader who was born and raised in Bulgaria during the final years of communism. At 19, she immigrated alone to the United States, worked multiple jobs while attending the University of Pennsylvania, and began sending a weekly email to a handful of friends containing the most interesting things she had discovered that week. That email eventually became Brain Pickings, which became the Marginalian, one of the most beloved and enduring literary and philosophical projects on the Internet. For two decades, Maria has devoted herself to tracing the connections between science and poetry, astronomy and love, nature and consciousness, all while building a body of work animated by wonder and rigor. She is the author of Figuring Traversal, the Universe in Verse, and several beautiful children's books. Threaded through all of her work is a sustained meditation on attention, wonder, and what it means to be fully alive. Maria Popova, welcome back to Design Matters.

[Maria Popova]

How wonderful and strange to be back here some 15 years later.

[Debbie Millman]

Yes, yes. Our first interview was back in 2012, and in that conversation we talked quite a bit about your origin story. So I want to encourage people to listen to that, to hear all about how you first But I still want to touch on some things about your early life that I didn't ask you about earlier before we talk about all you've done since.

[Maria Popova]

Well, first of all, I should probably listen because we become in every retelling of who we are, right?

[Debbie Millman]

This is true. This is true. So our avid listeners can go back and compare. In our first conversation on Design Matters, you described creativity as combinatorial, and I've talked about that many, many times on the show since, with lots and lots of the gathering and recombination of experiences, ideas and memories into something new. All these years later, I feel that this is not just a creative methodology for you, it feels more like a worldview.

[Maria Popova]

Hmm. To the extent that the world is only Rendered real in the mind. It is a mind view, meaning it is how I experience my own mind working. I think most of our minds work that way naturally, and we are able to kind of perceive the process. We call it creativity, this kind of aggregation, combination that is creation.

[Debbie Millman]

You've written so beautifully about wonder throughout your work, but I'm curious about your earliest encounters with it. What first astonished you as a child? You.

[Maria Popova]

You know, it's interesting. Wonder is one of those things that is so elemental and so universal, you might actually miss it. Meaning you might experience it but not know what it is. And I certainly didn't have the word for it until only recently looking back on my life and seeing that common denominator. I don't have many early childhood memories, but the ones that I do have all have an element of being very present in a moment in time, usually in the natural world, and this feeling of a great peace and a great surprise at the same time. And to me, that is wonder.

[Debbie Millman]

Mm, I love that. I haven't really thought about it in that way. Your website, Brain Pickings, the original name began as a weekly email to seven or eight friends while you were working at a creative agency in Philadelphia at the time. Did it feel more like an act of generosity or self education or survival?

[Maria Popova]

Well, it was a total act of hubris.

[Debbie Millman]

Actually, I hadn't considered that one.

[Maria Popova]

I mean, the shortest version is that I had come to the US sold on the promise of liberal arts education, which I thought was going to teach me how to live. And, you know, my family cobbled together the fortune, the great fortune of $800 that was supposed to last me through the first year. And instead I got here and by the time I had bed sheets and textbooks, it was gone. So I ended up working on nice bedsheets. Well, no nice textbooks. I had just touched the military industrial complex of higher education.

[Debbie Millman]

Yes, yes, that.

[Maria Popova]

And so I ended up instead finding myself in this factory for minds where you were tested on testing, meaning you were taught how to memorize and take tests, not how to live. So I kind of, not knowing what to do, started scrapping together my own little morsels of meaning. I would go to the library or go to a talk in downtown Philly and whatever. And so then one of the jobs I was working to pay for this very unsatisfying education was at this little creative agency. And at the time, the guys there were all these young idealists who had the founder, had run the first successful anti smoking campaign in history and was kind of inspired to try to use the communication arts to do such things. And I had gone to the US to study communication because I lived through the fall of communism. And I went from, you know, we had the dictator on TV every night at 8pm delivering one channel, obviously delivering the propaganda, the message. And overnight so called democracy came. And with it came advertising. And I as a child thought, wait a minute, this is the same message, it's just selling a different ideology. So I grew up and wanted to learn how to use the communication arts to move minds, but maybe for good and not for totalitarianism. So anyway, here I am in this age and the guys are circulating around the office emails of what other cool creative stuff is coming out of other agencies. And I at age 21, decide that I'm gonna tell them how to do their job. And I'm like, guys, no.

[Debbie Millman]

So you and Maria, even then

[Maria Popova]

I was just stubborn. Always, I guess. I mean, looking back, I think I've realized that every time I've been told these are the options on the table, I haven't just said, oh, let me show you another option. I've said, let me build you another table. And so I, not by any kind of moral high ground or because I just didn't like what was available. So I didn't like what they were circulating. I said, actually, if you want to do something really creative, take things from different disciplines, not your own neuroscience and medieval painting and street art, and see what you know, happens in the mind when these things converge. So I said, let me send you three things I learned on my own in my own kind of meaning foraging this week, every Friday, I'll send it. And then they were like, sure. And then they started asking me to add, oh, can you add my dad? Oh, can you add my girlfriend? And I was like, guys, I have a full college course load and four jobs. I can't administer an email. And so I thought the most obvious thing to do would be to build a website. There were no blogs then. And I took a night class. I saved for three weeks eating store brand tuna and oatmeal, the most nutritious cheap food you could get. And I took a night class and I built the ugliest website in the world.

[Debbie Millman]

Oh, can we find that in the Wayback machine?

[Maria Popova]

Oh my God. You know what? I think there are images because there were static pages that every. There were no blogs, there were no databases. You would literally put up like a bulletin on a cork board, put up the weekly edition and then next Friday, take it down, put up the New one. So I think there are screenshots of it somewhere. Wonderful. Oh, no, terrible. Anyway, so that is. That is how it started in the early.

[Debbie Millman]

Much of online culture rewarded speed, hot takes, aggregation. Brain pickings felt radically different even when I first started reading it, which was probably 2010, 2011. Contemplative, literary, slower. Were you consciously resisting the velocity of the Internet at the moment, or was that just the way you approached it? Naturally?

[Maria Popova]

I mean, I think because I only ever wrote for me to process my own life. I mean, it was and is the record of what I'm thinking about reckoning with. It didn't make sense. We don't live internally on those timelines. We don't. The inner life is not a hamster wheel. And also partly, I was putting it out into the world and I was very conscious of. I, as a person, don't enjoy clickbait and ads and snippet kind of shallow things. Why would I perpetrate that on other people? If I'm making something in the world, why not make the world we want to live in?

[Debbie Millman]

Your work is a refuge for people seeking depth and meaning online. And as the site eventually became more and more and more influential, you resisted all traditional models of monetization and growth.

[Narrator]

What.

[Debbie Millman]

What have you been trying to protect in doing that?

[Maria Popova]

My faith in humanity.

[Debbie Millman]

In what way?

[Maria Popova]

Fundamentally, people are generous and people are hungry for meaning. And when we value something, we show it. I really believe that we don't need the middleman of advertising to turn us into data points and eyeballs in order to show someone else how much we value some kind of sellable commodity. And I thought, if it's already reward enough for me to do this, to read and to write and to try to learn how to live, I'm still learning how to live 20 years in. You know, that's why I write. And I already have my reward. If other people find it valuable, then they should decide how much they value it and in what way. I should not enforce that or sell it. You can't sell meaning.

[Debbie Millman]

After 15 years of publishing as Brain Pickings, you renamed the site to Marginalian. I was very happy. Marginalia is one of my favorite concepts and undertakings. Why had the original title stop feeling truthful for you?

[Maria Popova]

Oh, it's so gross. It's so gross.

[Debbie Millman]

So, I mean, just as a. P.S. i can't stand it when people ask if they can pick my brain.

[Maria Popova]

Can you imagine when people asked me if they could pick my brain? Be like started that word. Oh, no. I mean, you have to take into account the fact that in Bulgarian we don't really have wordplay and puns. It just doesn't quite exist, this notion, this use of language. So when I came here, I was really excited about these kind of strange idioms and wordplay. And I will say also I studied multiple things in college. In addition to communication arts, I also studied psychology and was very interested in neuroscience. And I am not proud to say I was a kind of Neo Cartesian. I really thought the mind is all there is. How we think is who we are. And over the years, as I befriended the life of feeling, the life of the body and it reflected in the writing, I came to see that first of all, it was not just a brain thing, this thing that this search for meaning, it can't live just in the brain. And also I was just disgusted with this very cheap pun. But mostly, you know, I look back at some point, I think it was somebody had asked me after I'd written my first book, figuring why I write about women in science or queer people. And I had never thought about those categories. And I realized that I have been very influenced, moved, inspired, interested in people who existed in the margins of their time and place by whatever variable. And because of that, because they were already other in some way, they had the kind of self permission and freedom to think in ways others didn't think, to see what others didn't want to look at. And ended up coming up with the ideas that have moved this world forward, the so called marginal people. And on top of that I was writing about their lives and the kind of margins of the books I was reading. It was just everything I write is my own. Marginalia. On this search for what it means

[Debbie Millman]

to be alive, you're nearing your 20th anniversary of the marginalian. You have never accepted any advertising. You only write what interests you. And still 20 years in, you are one of the most visited sites on the web. What keeps you excited, motivated and inspired by doing this?

[Maria Popova]

I think perhaps the same three things that make it motivating to continue being alive, which is to learn something, to help someone, and to just feel it all.

[Debbie Millman]

You just mentioned your first book, Figuring out, which was published in 2018. Initially you were dismissive about ever writing a book and turned down the many offers that came your way and often stated why would I want to write something that would have the shelf life of a banana? And thinking back on that statement, I find it interesting that when you did eventually write books, and I'm talking about your library of work now, Your books are explicitly anti banana books. They're sprawling, they're archival, interdisciplinary works designed for longevity really, rather than topicality. What changed your mind about writing a book?

[Maria Popova]

Well, I never changed my mind about writing the kind of book that I was being offered a lot. I mean, publishers were approaching me all the time with the very surely marketable idea of doing a kind of best of brain pickings or you know, a compilation on a specific theme that I often write about. I mean, it could be anything, you know, diaries of great writers, daily routines, I mean, whatever, very kind of superficial, self helpy kind of thing. And those do have the shelf life of a banana. Books are just a vehicle for thought and feeling and ideas. And the only thoughts and feelings and ideas worth putting into the world are the ones that have the shelf life of a shelf.

[Debbie Millman]

Right.

[Maria Popova]

And those are certainly the books I read and love. And I thought if I were to put in the time, I mean, these things take years to write. These, you know, 600 page books that I ended up writing, if I were to put in the time it should be for something I would enjoy as a reader, that kind of thing.

[Debbie Millman]

I want to exist figuring did both actually. It was exactly what you wanted to write, but it was also an instant New York Times bestseller. Did that surprise you? I know you don't really think about things and measure them with those metrics, but it is an interesting, I think

[Maria Popova]

that says more about our culture than about the book. I think people were excited about the first book of the site they read. I would be very interested how many of those people finished the book. My own mother recently informed me that she never finished figuring there you have it, which was translated beautifully into Bulgarian.

[Debbie Millman]

Figuring is saturated with mortality, not just literal death, but the awareness of finitude as a condition of creativity, intimacy and meaning making. And the book repeatedly returns to the brevity of human life against cosmic time. It includes the deaths of central figures including Rachel Carlson, Kepler's children, Emily Dickinson's losses, extinction, disappearance, the tension between ambition and impermanence, and the idea that love and creativity are meaningful precisely because life ends. Did writing figuring change your relationship to mortality?

[Maria Popova]

I think we spend our lives changing our relationship to mortality, trying to befriend it, right?

[Debbie Millman]

Yes.

[Maria Popova]

And we make art to try to bear it, to try to bear our mortality. If we were not mortal, we would not make art. We wouldn't.

[Sponsor - Pura]

Why?

[Debbie Millman]

Why do you think that? Because I would like to live forever and I know I'm not going to, but that doesn't. My relationship to Art making now, later, it's change. Oh, you don't know. That's true too. My urgency is changing as I get older and older.

[Maria Popova]

Let me put it this way. I do think every artist's art is their coping mechanism for their suffering, whatever that is, and for their joys too. But much, much of it to metabolize our suffering. And most of our suffering is, at bottom, some sort of responds to the fact that we're immortal. Regret, heartache, loss, it's all confrontation with the finitude and the irreversibility of life.

[Debbie Millman]

I thought you were gonna say that it all had to do with love, not mortality. So it surprised me a little bit.

[Maria Popova]

Well, love is a coping mechanism for mortality as well, isn't it?

[Sponsor - Pura]

I don't know.

[Debbie Millman]

I would say it was a coping mechanism. I would say maybe it's the reward.

[Maria Popova]

Oh, that's beautiful.

[Debbie Millman]

At least I'd like to think that to me.

[Maria Popova]

But hold on. Okay, let's do it.

[Debbie Millman]

Let's do it.

[Maria Popova]

So every love story is a tragic story.

[Debbie Millman]

How?

[Maria Popova]

Because every love ends with a loss, either of the person or of their love, right? It ends with death or indifference or divorce or whatever, but it ends. There's no eternal love because there is no eternity allotted us. There isn't. I mean, maybe it is the reward, more like the recompense than a reward.

[Debbie Millman]

When you're writing your books, you do enormous amounts of research. And most recently, you told me that when you were writing about Walt Whitman, you read seven biographies, all of his surviving notebooks and letters, countless accounts by his contemporaries scattered across myriad books of memoirs of notable people, and you did this level of research for all of the figures in Figuring. And your most recent book, Traversal. How does this level of information inform what you write about?

[Maria Popova]

Well, I think if you're going for illumination, which is, of course, the point of writing, you need the information to make that truthful and possible. But I also. I think it's so dangerous. There's such a responsibility in trying to represent another person who can no longer speak for themselves, from whom you're separated by centuries and sensibilities and unimaginable cultural paradigms. We cannot imagine what it was like to live in Kepler's day, a time when Satan was more real to the average person than gravity. People lived to 40. There was no knowledge of genetics and hygiene and human rights. I mean, unimaginable world. This is just like a handful of things. And I don't write biography, but I write highly biographically informed, I guess, portraits of the Traits of those people that speak to me and that entwine with the traits of the other people in each of these books are each a kind of tapestry with these different lives woven together to paint a larger picture of something else. Right. That's not about the people. And I do think the responsibility of the writer speaking for and about someone else cannot be overestimated.

[Debbie Millman]

Does living inside these minds for as long as you do impact your own consciousness?

[Maria Popova]

Oh, absolutely. I think we are all to some extent, very porous. And I think the more sensitive a person, the more absorbent they are of the tone and way of seeing and way of worlding that another mind has. Right. And so for me, spending seven years with Mary Shelley and Whitman, they taught me how to see, they taught me how to feel. Of course. Of course. And then I miss them. I mean, the most tragic thing about these books for me is that when I'm done writing them, I mean, I've been living with these people daily. Right. When I'm done writing them, I feel this tremendous absence and grief. It's like a real person left.

[Debbie Millman]

I know how I'm impacted by doing research for a podcast and the weeks that I spend preparing how that changes me, how that influences me. And in many ways, the research influences me more than even the conversations because I'm just able to take in everything that they're saying and thinking without having the responsibility to respond or to figure out what I want to ask next. I can just, as you said, porous and take it all in. I can't imagine what living with characters for seven years does to you.

[Maria Popova]

Well, but, you know, it's interesting because that's a bit of a chicken egg or a self sel, because, I mean, you do. You started Design Matters in order to learn how creative people orchestrate and govern their lives. Right. So there is a kind of hunger to be modeled, different ways of seeing, different ways of being to be inspired. And so, of course, that will feed you even more than the conversation.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah, I mean, I think that the one thing that does keep me going, even when I'm feeling burnout or strain, stress, et cetera, is this endless fascination with how people create their lives. Not just their art, but how they choose to live in the world. And I also feel like you do that a lot in your work, which is what keeps me coming back to reading it every day.

[Maria Popova]

But the comforting thing about the dead who are my subject, yours. Yours is the living are not my forte. The comfort thing, greatly comforting thing about the dead is that you can choose your dead by virtue of their lives being foreclosed, meaning they can't surprise you, they can't suddenly turn out to be total assholes. You know, with sufficient information and biographical records, we have a pretty good sense of who someone was in their life, in the world. And something about the finality of their life, the notion that you can have it down. I mean, you can never of course understand what it's like to be anyone else. It's so misleading. But there is a comfort to me to kind of know how their lives turned out.

[Debbie Millman]

But what do you do when you find contradictory information where one interpretation might fly in the face of another interpretation and you have to figure out what the actual truth is?

[Maria Popova]

Well, first of all, I don't believe we can ever figure out what the truth of a person is. It's often obscure to the person themselves. Right. With biographies, I just always go to the primary source material. I mean, these biographers took it from somewhere, right? So I would go and find the surviving notebooks and diaries and letters, which are of course incomplete and also self mythologizing. I mean, some people, a big part of why I chose some of the people in traversal, particularly Whitman and Frederick Douglass, is that they were tremendous self mythologizers for all the good that they did. They also co created their own myth, right? And that comes through even in the diaries and letters of people. But you go as close to the bone as you can, as the death of the flesh allows.

[Debbie Millman]

You've also written several children's books with unusually philosophical tones. The Snail with the Right Heart is rooted in real scientific anomaly, but emotionally it's about belonging and uniqueness. And the coziest place on the moon feels deeply concerned with loneliness and tenderness. These books don't simplify existential ideas so much as render them emotionally accessible. What do you think children understand about reality? That adults often forget or miss entirely.

[Maria Popova]

That it continues to exist, whether or not we believe in it. And this is partly why my move with the children's books is that I read. I don't intend to, but I read a lot of science. And every once in a while I would come across a piece of science news that would strike me as this profound lens on something very intimate and emotional part of our kind of human inner universe. And then I would write a children's book based on the scientific article or fact or whatever. And I do think there's a kind of reverence for reality. I mean, children's imagination is actually a response, a deep response to actuality and what can be made with the creative constraint of reality.

[Debbie Millman]

Inasmuch as the Snail with the Right Heart is about a scientific anomaly, it's

[Sponsor - Bill]

also a love story.

[Debbie Millman]

And I'm wondering if you can just share a little bit of the plot with our listeners in case they haven't dipped into your children's books yet.

[Maria Popova]

So, some years ago, a retired researcher in the UK came upon a snail whose shell coils in the opposite direction. The vast, vast, vast majority of snails coil clockwise. And he found in a pile of garbage. How he noticed. That's another. It's a little homily on the art of noticing, Right. First of all, he saw the snail, saw that it coiled the other way and thought, hmm. So then he mailed the snail with some. With some, you know, dirt and sustenance to a snail researcher.

[Debbie Millman]

I love that there are people that just research snails, by the way.

[Maria Popova]

Oh, God. The lovely thing about science is that it is this refuge for the strangeness, the multiplicity of minds. I mean, the most wonderful thing about being human is how many minds there are. So anyway, one of those minds was studying snails and received the snail. Named it Jeremy for some English politician who was on the left, I guess I'm not versed in British politics and said that the odds of this happening are about one in a million to one to a billion. It's so rare, they can't even estimate how rare it is. And it's caused by a condition called sittos inversus, where the internal organs, by a genetic variant that's very rare obviously, are flipped. So humans have this. I know someone who has his heart on the right side. He has citizen versus. But with snails, the tricky thing is that because of how they mate. Please, Everybody, go on YouTube and look up Sir David Attenborough. Snails. I'll just tell you that. And your life will be transformed.

[Sponsor - Toyota]

It's a treat.

[Maria Popova]

Your life will be transformed. But because of how they mate, it is a kind of puzzle piece. So their reproductive organs have to fit. And so if your organs are on the other side, you can only mate with a snail that's on the other side also, you know, inverse. So then this world search began for another lefty snail, and it was eventually found in Australia and mailed, snail mailed to Jeremy. And then it's a drama. And then a drama ensues. I will let people find out in the children's book what happens, but it's

[Debbie Millman]

not what you expect, and it is absolutely wonderful. Why are you drawn to writing for children at this stage in your life.

[Maria Popova]

I think great children's books are works of philosophy in disguise. I grew up with the Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland. They taught me how to think, they taught me how to feel. I still reread the Little Prince about once a year, and every time it gives me something new and acutely relevant to something I'm grappling with that year. And I think also it's often in the and this simple language of children that we get to the deepest truths that we're embarrassed to think and talk about otherwise. And we cloak with all these convoluted theories and bells and whistles. But really, it is a way to get to the elemental.

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[Debbie Millman]

one of the things that I've really cherished watching you evolve as an artist is where your work goes next. And first you were writing very essayistically on the Marginalian. Then you started writing books for adults, books for children. Now you're writing poetry. Tell us about your relationship to poetry. I know initially you actually didn't like poetry. You sort of curled your nose up at poetry. So tell us what you have for you.

[Maria Popova]

Oh, absolutely. So I'm a refugee for mathematics. I grew up doing a lot of science and never, I guess, was properly educated in literature. And of course, the way we humans tend to have of dismissing what we don't understand. And Debbie's raising her hand and, you know, calling useless what we don't know how to use. I dismissed poetry. And then across the aisle on a transatlantic flight across 50 years of age difference, I became very cast friends, much to the discontentment of the entire coach cabin with a lovely woman named Emily Levine, who was a comedian, a philosopher of science, deeply erudite, deeply sensitive, funny as hell. And she took it upon herself to educate me in poetry. She started sending me a poem a day, reciting poetry with that magnificent voice she had. Magnificent voice, in fact. I mean, you asked about figuring and mortality. Emily, a few years into our friendship, I really loved her so much. She was a kind of mother figure to me and friend. And she became terminally ill and was actively dying while I was writing Figurine, which was dedicated to her. And in fact, she died the day it was published. And I didn't know because I had turned my phone off. I just didn't want to deal with the book stuff. And when I turned it on close to midnight, I learned. And it was. Yeah, I mean, I won't belabor it anyway. But Emily is also the reason the universe and verse exists because we, as she was dying, we started going on these poetry retreats, as you remember.

[Debbie Millman]

Yes, I was part of one.

[Maria Popova]

You.

[Narrator]

Yeah.

[Maria Popova]

And we would spend the weekend on the sort of promise of reading poetry, but really talking about the universe and Hannah Arendt and the singularity in ancient Greece, because Emily's mind was so fractal and so, I mean, combinatorial in the most beautiful, enchanting way. And in the course of it, I started seeing how poetry and science are these side doors to the same reality, to befriending reality. And I started reading poetry, writing about poetry, and eventually studying with very good poets Marie Howe and Ellen Bass, and eventually writing poetry.

[Debbie Millman]

I'm wondering if you would share one of your poems with us today and share a bit about how you came to writing it.

[Maria Popova]

So this is a poem that I wrote in the state of heartbreak, I thought. And it's. It's a little bit more tongue in cheek, begins a little more tongue in cheek than the rest of my poems. But I think it's one we all need at some point in our life or the sentiment in it. This is called corrective for a broken heart. Why all the threadbare drama, the stale catastrophism of calling it broken. It still beats, doesn't it? Still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense. There is no one to pick up the pieces because there are no pieces, only the firm, fastidious hand of time to slide it back into place. And after all, who can fault the wayward compass when the magnetic North Pole is in constant motion, drifting by 50 km a year and reversing itself altogether every few centuries, while every 26,000 years a different North Star comes to shine its guiding light. Above all the confusion. We are here to lose our way.

[Debbie Millman]

Thank you. Talk about, if you can, the different muse that might occur between writing poetry and writing essays or prose.

[Maria Popova]

My prose tends to be quite analytical, quite focused on thinking through something. Not always, but fundamentally, it is a kind of thought process. And the poetry is more about feeling, befriending feeling.

[Debbie Millman]

How do you know when something wants to become poetry rather than an essay?

[Maria Popova]

Oh, I don't. In fact, I plagiarize my poems all the time and put them into paragraphs of prose. And in fact, my wonderful editor Eric noted so the prelude of my book, traversal. Both of the big books have a prelude, a short chapter zero in the beginning. That Kind of in a very abstract way, makes a promise of what's to come. But it's not biographical information or any of that. It's very kind of abstract. And so I had poached a poem that I had written in a workshop with Marie Howe and Ellen Bass and literally erased the line breaks and put it as a paragraph in the prelude. And Eric, in the editing manuscript had written in the margin, you know, this could be a poem.

[Debbie Millman]

Your public project, the Universe in verse began in 2017 as a live event pairing poetry with science. But over time, it seems to have evolved into a communal ritual. All of your events have immediately sold out large venues. Did you understand from the beginning that audiences were so hungry for that kind of collective meaning making from poetry and science?

[Maria Popova]

Oh, not at all. I thought no one would come, but I just wanted to do it. I think part of it is, you know, the Universe and Verse was born in the wake of the first Trump election, and many factors were present. First of all, it was the age of alternative facts, and science was being difficult, devalued. And I thought, we need a way for people to befriend science that is welcoming and hospitable, you know, and poetry also, you know, the National Endowment for the Arts was being massively defunded, which is the main funding body for poets. Poets are the lowest paid artists in our world. And the NEA was how, you know, a lot of their funding came from. And that went away. And I thought, maybe there are others like me out there who curl their nose at poetry because they don't understand it, they're not literate in it, maybe we can invite them in. And so the concept was to get people friends who are creative people of other walks of life, musicians, actors, artists to come read poems that I choose. And then I would talk some science behind poems that have an element of science. So, for example, Patti Smith reading a Rebecca Elson poem about dark matter. And then I would talk about Vera Rubin and the discovery and the confirmation of dark matter, that kind of thing, as a way of welcoming people both into art and science. And I used, every year I used the proceeds towards something that was threatened. So the first three or four years it was the Natural Resources Defense Council, then it was the Academy of American Poets. So this kind of active resistance and also active support of what was losing support.

[Debbie Millman]

One of the beautiful ideas at the center of the project is that science and poetry are not opposing disciplines, but complementary ways of knowing the world. Do you think that modern culture artificially separated intellect from feeling, or that they currently still do.

[Maria Popova]

I mean, I think Descartes is the most damaging man in the history of our species. 400 years later, where I knew you

[Debbie Millman]

were gonna say yes.

[Maria Popova]

I mean, because it's the truth.

[Debbie Millman]

That was a prompt.

[Maria Popova]

He has scarred us to the bone, you know, with this extraordinary Western dualism of the mind being separate from the body. And higher up somehow it is so damaging. We spend our lives discovering over and over that it is not true. When we feel joy, it's a full body experience. When we suffer, it's a full body experience. When we create, it's a full body experience. Everything. There's no clear demarcation between thought and feeling. Feeling is an instrument of thinking. I really recommend philosopher Martin Nussbaum's book, the Intelligence of Emotions. Yes.

[Debbie Millman]

Let's talk about another one of your combinatorial creative endeavors. Your Bach's collection of divinations titled An Almanac of Birds. This is your first project wherein you're both creating the art alongside writing poetry. Yet another expanse of your body of work. Can you share how this project came to be?

[Maria Popova]

One November day, I was walking through Brooklyn Bridge park in the rain, and I saw a night heron sleeping on a branch perched over the pond, its head tucked into its chest. And I thought, is it dreaming? Do birds dream? And I thought, surely you can Google that. Turns out you couldn't. So I found myself on a three week rabbit hole in these obscure scientific journals, kind of alarmed to discover that we've only been studying the avian brain and sleep in the avian brain for about 20 years, if that. And there's only a handful of published FMRI and EEG studies of what happens when they sleep.

[Sponsor - Pura]

Sleep.

[Maria Popova]

And I was so surprised by what I found that I ended up writing about it. I wrote a piece for the New York Times about REM and the evolution of sleep. And the short version is basically, they do dream. Not only do they dream, but evolution invented rem, the dream rich REM state in the avian brain and when they sleep. So, for example, pigeons, during REM sleep, areas of their brain associated with wing motor action and spatial navigation light up. And songbirds, young songbirds who have to learn their repertoire while they sleep. You can map the activity of particular neurons to particular notes in the melody they were learning that day. So birds dream, they dream of flying and they dream of singing, and they're practicing in their sleep. And I thought, how incredible that evolution gave us a safe place to practice the possible. And so then after this immersion in the Bird sleep world. Birds started coming to my own dreams, which was very unusual because I tend to have hyper realistic dreams, mostly anxiety dreams about missing trains and things like that.

[Debbie Millman]

Teeth falling out and so forth. So much fun.

[Maria Popova]

Oh, God, I haven't had that one yet. But now that you've planted the seed in my unconscious, I look forward to losing my teeth in my sleep.

[Debbie Millman]

It's one of the most common anxiety dreams. Missing vinyls, missing trains, missing planes.

[Maria Popova]

Why are teeth so primal? That's so interesting, isn't it?

[Debbie Millman]

Well, there you go.

[Maria Popova]

Well, it's never had in my large repertoire of anxiety dreams, the tooth has not appeared, or disappeared for that matter. But what did appear was a great blue heron carrying the sky on her back and a million sandhill cranes unspooling from the horizon, becoming the Milky Way, and a magpie speaking to me in my mother's voice. And I thought, what does it all mean? And meanwhile, I was discovering that a number of people in my life that I love and respect intellectually were using tarot cards. Now, I mentioned I come from the world of science. So I have spent my life dismissing those types of things as anti scientific. Residual medievalism from that world Kepler lived in, where Satan was more real in gravity. And then, of course, as tends to happen when I replaced contempt with curiosity, which we don't do as often as

[Debbie Millman]

we should, from contempt to curiosity.

[Maria Popova]

Oh, that. That's a good tombstone title. She went from contempt to curiosity and died. Anyway, I came to see that people need these languages of interpretation, of our own experience, because we're living with so much uncertain, we're so opaque to ourselves and we could use these aids, right?

[Debbie Millman]

But what allowed you to move from skepticism to curiosity?

[Maria Popova]

Because the people I loved, like my friend Tom, who's the closest thing I have to a brother, uses like actually uses tarot. And I was like, tom is not an idiot.

[Debbie Millman]

Yay, Tom.

[Maria Popova]

But, you know, these are the judgments we make about people we think people think are idiots because they don't see things the way we do, you know, and it's so habitual, we don't even catch it. Anyway, I, of course, though, being very stubborn and wanting the other table, wanting to build the new table, decided I was gonna make a kind of anti tarot deck of my own, of divinations from the birds, because I was still thinking about, what does it all mean, these birds coming to my dreams. And I would make 41 of these little decks and I would give them to friends for my 41st birthday, for my birthdays, I prefer giving presents to receiving. And so I started. Who knows why. I have a long history of cutting up things and making new things out of them. For example, for you, I had once cut up a little golden book and made a poem. I have cut up.

[Debbie Millman]

You also cut up the little graphic films that I was making and made a brand new one.

[Maria Popova]

That's right.

[Debbie Millman]

That was one of the very first things I'm proud of that listeners. Just so you know, while we are best friends now, Marie and I were also a couple for five years. So that might be why you hear some of that sort of recognition. And you should also know ways of dealing with each other.

[Maria Popova]

You should also know Debbie made these incredible films with hand drawn typography and pencil, mostly pencil art based on movies that she was watching. I mean, I can't. I'm doing a very poor job of. What were they called?

[Debbie Millman]

Graphic movies.

[Maria Popova]

Graphic movies. Look, look for them. They're so moving, they're so tender. Anyway, the point is, with my long history of cutting up things, I like creative constraint, I like language. I woke up one day with a very clear, mysterious idea in that combinatory way the mind has of, you know, putting things together and you don't know how. The new thing came of taking my favorite 19th century ornithological books. I love 19th century illustration, natural history, astronomy, ornithologists, that. And so what I would do is every night I would look through one of these books and let a bird call out to me visually, the arts. And I was using obviously John James Audubon's Birds of America, John and Elizabeth Gould's Birds of Europe and other, you know, but most of these two. Then I would read the ornithological description of that species in the book, in the same book, and let the language percolate in my mind and go to sleep. Sleep and see what the nocturnal unconscious would do in shuffling. And then in the morning, I would reread it and pull out words and phrases and rearrange them into this little koan or, you know, the divination from the bird. And it was always so surprising what came because it was my own mind making it. But somehow it surprised me. I mean, that's a strange thing about consciousness that you can surprise yourself.

[Debbie Millman]

You described the Byrds as collaborators, that they were writing you.

[Maria Popova]

Yes.

[Debbie Millman]

Have you increasingly come to trust the unconscious as a creative partner?

[Maria Popova]

I mean, it's more that I've increasingly come to recognize how it's always played such a huge part. And then I have hubristically taken Credit for it as conscious decisions.

[Debbie Millman]

And you also write that anything you polish with attention becomes a mirror. And I'm wondering, what has sustained attention taught you about yourself?

[Maria Popova]

That the world beyond myself is far more interesting than the self. You know, I mean, I say this playfully, but also not, I think, our most rewarding experiences. You asked about wonder. Wonder is only possible in a moment of unselfing.

[Debbie Millman]

Talk about what that means.

[Maria Popova]

That means. I mean, it's a term I've borrowed from Iris Murdoch, who used it as a kind of. Of aside in an essay about what nature and art do for us. She called them occasions for unselfing, where this illusory package of narrative and interpretation and memory that we call a self comes this bandage for a little moment. And the world comes in the world, the otherness of the world and also the belonging with that otherness. I think the self is such a tedious place. We live in it, and especially in our culture, we where people lead with identities and opinions which are the most superficial, malleable, changeable, uninteresting parts of personhood. It's very easy to become imprisoned in the self.

[Debbie Millman]

You have described the unconscious as possessing secret knowledge that the analytical mind cannot access. Does that have any connection to selfing or unselfish?

[Maria Popova]

I think what we call self is mostly the conscious self, the one doing the narrating of who we are. And the unconscious self is who governs how we conduct ourselves a lot of the time without us realizing it.

[Debbie Millman]

How do you become more aware of those two storylines?

[Maria Popova]

Therapy. Therapy twice a week.

[Debbie Millman]

Let's talk about your brand new book. Your brand new book is titled Traversal, and it feels like the continuation or even culmination of many concerns that have threaded through your work for years. Astronomy, mortality, love, consciousness, and the search for meaning. And very early in the book, you suggest that humanity keeps asking many versions of the same essential question. What is life? What is death? What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? And the answer may simply be love. When did love become for you not merely emotional, but cosmological?

[Sponsor - Bill]

Hmm.

[Maria Popova]

Wow. What a beautiful way to put it. I think the hardest thing about being alive is that we exist as accidents of chance, and the universe does not hand us down. Meaning. There is no meaning. I mean, this is also about the divinations. It's related. I don't believe this impartial universe is giving us transient modes of stardust, personalized instructions about how to live our tiny, perishable lives. It doesn't care, you know, But I do believe in omens, which is the significance we confer upon the chance events of our lives. And this is part of our restless hunger for meaning, which is our own responsibility. Nobody and nothing will give us meaning. We have to make it. And I think love is an instrument for how to do that.

[Debbie Millman]

Talk to me a little bit more about what you just said about omens, because in many ways you are a scientist, a scientist of the mind, and the idea that an omen falls into your reality in some ways feels very unlikely.

[Maria Popova]

But that's the point though, that that's the difference between signs and omens. Omens are internally generated. We are pattern recognizing animals. We have to make sense of what is happening to us. And the fact is, much of what is happening to us is the product of randomness. But we need to create a pattern in order for it to make sense, and we call that an omen. So, for example, oh, a great blue heron appeared on my morning walk the day that I was gonna make a cross country move. You know, that great blue heron is fishing, it is hunting, it is there many times over the course of many days. I just happen to come upon it in that moment and I make of it an omen about the concerns of my own life. And I think we need that. It's not just some silly kind of byproduct of consciousness. I think it is the crux of consciousness that we interpret and give story and give meaning.

[Debbie Millman]

Do they hold any credence? Any real credence?

[Maria Popova]

I mean, that's a question about reality. What is reality?

[Debbie Millman]

Right.

[Maria Popova]

That encounter holds no significance in the life of the heron. It has no bearing on the reality of this hunting bird. But if I choose for it to mean something to me, if I say, well, this is now a good omen and I'm making the right decision, moving to the other side of the continent, that changes my own orientation to my own life, which in turn changes how I inhabit this reality, the kind of reality I make. Because my intention is now different, my openness, my receptivity is different solely by an act of interpretation.

[Debbie Millman]

So how much scientific credence would you put into those omens?

[Maria Popova]

Zero. But I may still need them to live my life. That's the point.

[Debbie Millman]

Yeah, I love the idea of seeing meaning in an encounter, however random it might be.

[Maria Popova]

And isn't that what love is too? The meaning you confer upon a stranger?

[Debbie Millman]

One of the most striking things about traversal is the way you braid together astronomical discovery, romantic longing and existential uncertainty until they begin to feel like expressions of the same impulse. Did you come to think of the book as partly about the human hunger to locate ourselves literally as well as figuratively?

[Maria Popova]

Well, not consciously, certainly. But now that you ask me this, I am realizing I am a person who is dislocated, has been dislocated since very early childhood. My early childhood was marked by me being sort of scent abandoned. Well, I know interpretive, interpretive. You know, I don't want to do the kind of, you know, competitive suffering we live in now. But I was sent. I was apart from my parents a lot. I was in many different places. And then I, by Choice, at 19, dislocated myself across the ocean. And even now I live different parts of the year, very far away places. I do think place and personhood entwine in a meaningful way. We become who and what we are. I mean, we're animals who are still shaped by their habitat, and we are different animals in different habitats. There is a kind of compass of searching for how to be by where to be.

[Debbie Millman]

Many of the figures in the book seem animated by a kind of impossible yearning to measure the heavens, transcend the self and understand or outwit time. Do you think curiosity is ultimately an expression of longing?

[Maria Popova]

Hmm, yes. I think it's the bridge, our only bridge between the known and the unknown. And it is a ramshackle bridge because a lot may just be unknowable, but curiosity is this idealistic, optimistic orientation that the universe can be known even by creatures that are a function of it.

[Debbie Millman]

It's interesting that you bring up optimism because again and again in traversal, scientific discovery is accompanied by loneliness, obsession, exile, grief. Were you consciously exploring the emotional cost of devotion to knowledge?

[Maria Popova]

Very much so. I think it's so important to understand the price at which knowledge is obtained and also the fact that the hunger for truth is always more powerful than all of these difficult dark forces in us.

[Debbie Millman]

In many ways, similar to Figuring Traversal feels haunted by immortality, but it also expands upon the ideas presented in Figuring Traversal also explores extinction, as I mentioned, disappearance, historical erasure. Was the book also a way of reckoning with impermanence?

[Maria Popova]

Of course.

[Debbie Millman]

How do you think about impermanence now, having written these two books so much about time and mortality?

[Maria Popova]

I think the desire for permanence or immortality, they're all a function of this, I think, rather destructive desire to have it all, desire for everything. And I think the challenge of life, the task of life, is to have enough.

[Debbie Millman]

I have one last question for you, Maria, and a request first, the question across the Universe and verse Traversal, the Marginalian and Almanac of Birds. You keep returning to two central themes. Rescuing meaning from fragmentation and inspiring people to look and live more meaningfully. After everything you've read, written, lived and experienced, what do you believe most helps human beings remain fully open to one another and the world.

[Maria Popova]

More wonder, less certainty.

[Debbie Millman]

And now, my request. Would you share one more poem with us, please, to close out the show for you?

[Maria Popova]

Anything.

[Debbie Millman]

And when is the book of poems gonna happen?

[Maria Popova]

Oh, God, I've been such a closet poet for so long. It's not a small deal to share this right now, okay?

[Debbie Millman]

Hence my inclination to do this.

[Maria Popova]

I know, I know. All right, well, this is one that kind of fits with your final couple of questions. This is called the wildest bet is the winning bet. You wouldn't have bet on it. The battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe wouldn't have guessed that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and mines. And the humming bird wings whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink in your eye that took 500 million years from trilobites to telescope. And the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder 200 times more slowly than the tectonic plates beneath are drifting apart. And the marbled orca carrying her dead calf down the entire edge of the continent carrying the weight of consciousness and consciousness. How it windows this tenement of breath and bone with wonder. How it hovers over everything gigantic and unnecessary, like music, like love.

[Debbie Millman]

Maria Popova, thank you for making so much work that matters. And thank you for joining us me today on Design Matters.

[Maria Popova]

Absolutely wonderful.

[Debbie Millman]

Maria's most current book is titled Traversal, and you can read more by Maria on her website, themarginalian.org this is the 21st year we've been podcasting Design Matters and I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference or we can do both. Maria never liked that phrase, but I keep using it anyway.

[Maria Popova]

I've come around.

[Debbie Millman]

I'm Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

[Narrator]

Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The film, first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor in chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.

[Debbie Millman]

That was so much fun. I hope you liked it.

[Maria Popova]

You're intense.

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