Maria Popova
speaker
931 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 22 Jun
Maria Popova’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
is always more powerful than all of these difficult, dark forces in us.
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.
More wonder, less certainty.
Oh, God.
I've been such a closet poet for so long, it's not a small deal to me.
To share this right now.
Okay.
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 hummingbird wing, whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink.
In your eye that took 500 million years from trilobites to telescopes.
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.
Absolutely wonderful.
Showing 501–520 of 931 · page 26 of 47
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