We are Maria Popova and Willow Defebaugh. We met at a loom on a farm, bonded over Maria’s bird divinations, and decided to apply the same process to an ethos we discovered that we share: We both love science — that is, the wonder-smitten human passion for truth, for understanding how nature works, for peeling back the curtain of mystery to glimpse tiny dazzling fragments of reality — and we both believe that human nature is a fractal of that same magnificent mystery, with parts of us as remote as the outer reaches of the Solar System, as fathomless as the depths of the Mariana Trench, and just as interesting to explore. And we vehemently disagree with Keats, who indicted Newton for “unweaving the rainbow” — taking the magic out of nature with science. No: Science only magnifies the magic.
Each weekend, we take one science news article and let the words in it come loose, come alive, arrange themselves into whatever the unconscious wants to say to the mind, then we exchange what emerges: poems, koans, subterranean currents of thought and feeling that over and over surprise us, invite us into deeper conversation with each other and with ourselves, delight us with what staggeringly different things two minds can make of the same material, yet how kindred in underlying spirit.
This free Substack is the record of our weekly adventures in language, wonder, and the secret wisdom of the heart: Every Saturday, we share the divinations we each made of a piece of science news, laid out over a piece of 18th- or 19th-century scientific illustration that shines a sidewise gleam on the subject. We are making all the divinations available as prints and other tangibles, and donating the proceeds to The Nature Conservancy.
Although this practice is pure play, it has become a lovely way to loosen the ligaments of our formal writing and equip our prose with particles of the poetic. We encourage you to try it.
For a taste of what to expect, here are some of our favorite divinations from the first six months:
Words from: “An Elephant Is Blind Without Its Whiskers” (The New York Times)
Images from: Die vergleichende Osteologie [The Comparative Osteology] illustrated by Edouard Joseph d’Alton, 1821
Words from: “How Microbes Got Their Crawl” (The New York Times)
Images from: Sulla fina anatomia degli organi centrali del sistema nervoso [On the fine anatomy of the central organs of the nervous system] by Camillo Golgi, 1885
Words from: “Eating ‘Family Style’ May Have Set the Stage for Life as We Know It” (The New York Times)
Images from: Report on the Radiolaria Collected by H.M.S. Challenger During the Years 1873-76 by Ernst Haeckel, 1887
Words from: “They’re Trying to Find a Mate for This Very Lonely Caterpillar” (The New York Times)
Images from: Illustrations of New Species of Exotic Butterflies by William C. Hewitson, 1856
