What Did You Love You heard from me now we want to hear from you.

When we really listen to people there is an alternating current, and this recharges us so that we never get tired of each other.

Shes been writing Brain Pickings for 13 years now and has accumulated a vast library of articles on books, people, and more.

So, I was very excited when I heard that she was writing a book.

I would sit on my porch in the late afternoon and savour ten pages or so at a time.

Most are women who were remarkable in every way including astronomer Maria Mitchell, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, writer Margaret Fuller, poet Emily Dickinson, amd scientist Rachel Carson.

They pushed the boundaries of society at the time and stayed true to themselves.

We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence by holding onto illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives.

All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for our history.

History is not what happened, but what survives of the shipwrecks of judgement and chance.

And that her book, Woman, was one of the first to make a case for the empowerment of women.

And that she had an intellectually intimate relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Popova compares Fuller to the writer and critic, Rebecca Solnit, another of my favourite writers today.

Did you know that she didnt take up photography until she was 50 Cameron went on to become one of the finest portraitists of her day, photographing Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson.

She withdrew from the world and made little effort to be published.

In fact, she asked that her poems be destroyed upon her death.

Dickinson didnt want her writing compromised in any way and had no desire for fame or recognition.

She alone would achieve what all the Transcendentalists had attempted and failed at a purification of being by deliberate removal from the bustling commonplaces of society.

This book was responsible for the banning of the insecticide DDT.

I believe that whenever you destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of mans spiritual growth.

Maybe I needed to wait for this particular time in my life to fully appreciate its mastery.

While the book specifically explains how insecticides, particularly DDT, affect every aspect of the natural world, its also a beautiful illustration of how life is interconnected in every single way.

Ironically, Carson was dying of cancer as she finished the book and died not long after it was published.

But those stories are just as interesting and show how our chance relationships help shape and inform who we are.

The quote from the introduction brought to mind some of the elements of another book you recommend Wabi Sabi -how life is impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete.

Figuring By Maria Popova