By Maria Popova
We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the living — life keeps surprising us, keeps reminding us that all too often the wildest bet is the winning bet. And all the while, we, living mysteries, keep surprising ourselves. To give up on anything — a dream, a loved one, love itself — is to deny this most irrepressible pulse-beat of being alive.
These truths came thundering down upon me in a recent installment of Reweaving the Rainbow — a collaboration with my wonderful friend Willow, taking science news and applying to them my bird divination process, liberating language from the shackles of its technical context to converse with the unconscious in the shape of a poem, a koan, a prayer for something larger than understanding. In the particle collider of the subterranean mind, a long New York Times article about honeybee veterinarians became exactly what I needed, and didn’t know I needed, to hear — a spell against resignation, an insistence on surprise over probability, an antilamentation for the possible:
