In the persistence and resilience of life, there is cause for hope
‘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.
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoMathematics
After centuries of trying, we’ve yet to arrive at a perfect way to map colour
20 minutes
videoLife stages
Grief, healing and laughter coexist at a unique retreat for widows and widowers
15 minutes
videoNature and landscape
After independence, Mexico was in search of identity. These paintings offered a blueprint
15 minutes
videoConsciousness and altered states
What do screens depicting serene natural scenes mean to those living in lock-up?
12 minutes
videoArchitecture
A lush tour of Fallingwater – the Frank Lloyd Wright design that changed architecture
14 minutes
videoHome
Life moves slowly in a Romanian mountain village, shaped by care and the seasons
13 minutes
videoNature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
videoAnimals and humans
One man’s quest to save an orphaned squirrel, as narrated by David Attenborough
14 minutes