I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Neither of us knew who the other was — Willow turned out to be the co-founder of the wonderful and necessary Atmos, devoted to reenchanting humanity with the rest of nature. I had just led a workshop based on my bird divinations and Willow had so delighted in the process that I suggested we apply it 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 since the day we met, we have been taking one science news article and letting the words in it come loose, come alive, arrange themselves into whatever the unconscious wants to say to the mind, then exchanging 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. We started out doing it only in text, but as a lover of natural history and astronomical art from the golden age of scientific illustration, I eventually offered to lay out our divination over restored images from centuries-old books I love, just as I had done with the bird divinations, each becoming a kind of one-page picture-book.Six months in, we decided to share our weekly adventures in language, wonder, and the secret wisdom of the heart on a new free Substack, separate from The Marginalian and separate from Atmos: Every Saturday, we publish the divination we each made from a piece of science news as an artwork, which we are making available as a print and other tangibles (including field notebooks, greeting cards, and tote bags), and donating the proceeds to The Nature Conservancy.Although this practice remains 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 yourself as you follow our ongoing adventures on Substack. 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “A A Diver Visited a Fallen Whale. When He Returned, It Was Gone.” (The New York Times)Images from: Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Säugethiere [Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals] by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “A A Diver Visited a Fallen Whale. When He Returned, It Was Gone.” (The New York Times)Images from: Naturgeschichte und Abbildungen der Säugethiere [Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals] by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found” (The New York Times)Images from: The Stone Age in North America by Warren King Moorehead, 1910 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “430,000-Year-Old Wooden Tools Are the Oldest Ever Found” (The New York Times)Images from: The Stone Age in North America by Warren King Moorehead, 1910 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “A Big Night Light in the Sky? Start-Up Wants to Launch a Space Mirror.” (The New York Times)Images from: An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “A Big Night Light in the Sky? Start-Up Wants to Launch a Space Mirror.” (The New York Times)Images from: An Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe by Thomas Wright, 1750 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Hewitson, 1856 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords 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 Hewitson, 1856 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “The ‘Lost Sisters’ of the Pleiades Fill the Entire Night Sky” (The New York Times)Images from: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s astronomical drawings, 1872-1882 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature ConservancyWords from: “The ‘Lost Sisters’ of the Pleiades Fill the Entire Night Sky” (The New York Times)Images from: Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s astronomical drawings, 1872-1882 Available as a print and more, benefitting The Nature Conservancydonating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.