‘More and more I have come to admire resilience…’

A collaboration between the US poet Jane Hirshfield, the US animator Kelli Anderson, and Bulgarian-born, US-based writer Maria Popova, Optimism is a brief yet powerful celebration of ‘the persistence of life against all odds’. Inspired both by a moment in which Popova stopped to marvel at a tiny weed emerging from a San Francisco sidewalk and by Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem ‘Song of Winnie’ (‘Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can’), Anderson’s stop-motion animation springs tiny, vibrant paper plants to life out of concrete cracks and crevices around Brooklyn. Read more about the project on Popova’s blog Brain Pickings.