By Maria Popova
Like arithmetic, the truest metaphors should not invented however found. In truth, they hardly really feel like metaphors — they really feel like equations equating one thing beforehand unseen with one thing acquainted as a way to see extra deeply into the character of actuality.
One morning out on a run whereas touring for a poetry workshop, I finished mid-stride on the sight of a tiny tree capturing up from the middle of a trunk twice as huge as me — a regenerative progress generally known as coppicing. I will need to have walked previous dozens, lots of of such cussed second lives over time. However for some cause, this one — at that second in my life, at that second on the earth — turned a mirror, a portal, a miniature of a bigger fact about what made us and what we’ve got product of ourselves.
By sunset, it had change into a poem — learn right here to the sound of Zoë Keating’s “Optimist” from her breathtaking album Into the Timber.
HOW TO MAKE A WORLD
by Maria PopovaWhat are you, little tree
rising from the middle
of the previous slain stump?
You might be no requiem,
no prophet,
no metaphor for a way
life goes on asserting itself
over demise.No — you appear to be
only a fractal department
of the identical dumb resilience
by which we rose from the oceans
to compose the Benedictus
and to construct the bomb.
Couple with one other discovered metaphor within the form of a poem in regards to the stubbornness of hope, then savor Pattiann Rogers’s beautiful “Homo Sapiens: Creating Themselves.”
