Wonder Cabinet

Joan Halifax loves Wordsworth’s summons to “see into the life of things.” For the Buddhist abbot of Upaya Zen Center, this kind of deep seeing has been a lifelong pursuit, and it has led to her care for the dying.

Now in her 80s, Halifax has had a remarkable life, from medical anthropology to psychedelic research to Zen practice. For more than fifty years, she has sat with dying people and trained the hospice workers, nurses, and doctors who care for them. Upaya is known for its socially engaged Buddhism, with decades of experience in end-of-life care, along with its work in prisons and with the homeless.

In this conversation, Halifax talks about the freedom and deepening that can arise in old age, and her own experience of nearly dying. She describes sitting with a dying person as an experience of wonder, perhaps even an encounter with the ultimate mystery of our lives.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:00 Wonder at the Deathbed
00:14:35 Open-Heart Surgery and Luminosity
00:22:35 Calm, Joy, and Growing Old

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Twenty years ago, Maria Popova was newly arrived in the US and working four jobs to pay for college. Lonely and disoriented, she started keeping a record of her search for meaning. Today, what began as an email to seven friends has millions of followers and is preserved in the Library of Congress permanent web archive. 

The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings) is still a one-woman labor of love, a free and ad-free cultural blog exploring science and philosophy, art and literature, poetry and children’s books. In this conversation, Maria Popova looks back on twenty years of reading and writing “through the lens of wonder.” How do we make sense of life in a random and chaotic universe? How do we sustain a sense of wonder in the face of disappointment or despair? Popova shares some of her own inspirations – from reading Mary Shelley’s diaries and J.R.R. Tolkien’s letters, to witnessing Bulgaria’s popular democratic uprising as a child.  We discuss science as a portal to wonder, and her fascination with mapping the invisible connections that link people and ideas across time and place.  

In addition to The Marginalian, Popova has written multiple books: "Figuring" (2019), an LA Times Book Prize-winning “biographical mosaic” weaving together the lives of historical figures such as astronomer Johannes Kepler, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, and marine biologist Rachel Carson; "Traversal" (2026), connecting the lives and legacies of visionaries like Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin; "The Universe in Verse" (2024), an anthology of science and poetry; "The Snail with the Right Heart" (2021), a true, illustrated children's story about genetic mutation, chance, and biological uniqueness; and "An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days" – an oracle deck. 

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00:00:00 Meet Maria Popova
00:05:00 Wonder Beyond the Listicle
00:11:30 Growing Up in Bulgaria
00:24:08 Mary Shelley, Lichen and Chance

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• The Marginalian

How does a landscape come alive and even feel enchanted? Bestselling author Daniel Mason explores this question in his novels “Country People” and “North Woods.” Both are steeped in the natural history of New England, from its geology to its native plants and animals. They capture the uncanny feeling of living in a landscape layered with human history — the stone walls, cellar holes, and other remnants of lives long past, hidden in the woods.

In this conversation, Mason talks about the deep history of the land and the folklore of rural Vermont. One plot strand in “Country People” involves a secret society whose members believe the Earth is hollow, with a cave leading to a magical kingdom inside. Mason, who’s also a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, is fascinated by the thin line between imagination and delusion. He believes novelists exist in a state of wonder, and he’s drawn to visionary writers like Dante, Milton, and William Blake. One recurring theme in his fiction is the idea of a “paradise lost.”

This episode begins with a bonus segment: Anne and Steve go metal detecting with their neighbor Sheila on their Vermont land, searching for lost artifacts. And what do they find? A colonial shoe buckle buried in their field!

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00:00:00 Metal Detecting a Colonial Shoe Buckle
00:04:55 Local Legends and Living History
00:11:25 Country People's Hollow Earth
00:20:50 Delusion, Vision and Enchantment
00:30:21 Ghosts, Dogs and Paradise Lost

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Our obsession with the dream of artificial, disembodied intelligence is deadening our experience of life itself. Melanie Challenger — a philosopher, naturalist and National Geographic Explorer —  says it’s time to let go of the centuries-old human history of pretending we’re not animals, of separating ourselves from the rest of the natural world. The essence of life, she says, is being a body — the source of the agency, purpose and intelligence that defines every living being, from the plant turning toward the sun to the hawk diving for its prey, to the child reaching for her mother. 

In two poetic and rigorously argued books, “How To Be Animal," and “Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Natural World," Challenger makes the case for restoring meaning to organisms — a project that is both scientific, philosophical, and profoundly moral. It also offers a path toward re-enchantment: a way to think about how to revive a sense of the pulsating aliveness that surrounds us, and about what might follow if we did.  

In this conversation, Challenger talks about her early work with survivors of genocide and war crimes, which led her to think deeply about the psychology of dehumanization. She recounts her first, lyrical trips as a naturalist and writer-in-residence in the Sub Antarctic and following blue whales off the coast of Costa Rica. And she talks about her re-discovery of Aristotle, the ancient philosopher whose concept of life as “en-soulment” showed her how to redefine what it means to be alive.  

This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.

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00:00:00 Intro
00:05:00 War Witness to Naturalist
00:18:00 Beyond the Machine Body
00:27:00 Sequoia Seed and Aristotle

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What kind of truth can a sacred text offer about the world? Rabbi Geoff Mitelman reads the Torah as poetry — open to multiple interpretations and evoking a sense of transcendence, even magic.

Mitelman is a Reform rabbi and the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization building bridges between science and religion, particularly Judaism. He reads the creation story in Genesis as a profoundly mysterious text — complementary to the scientific account of the Big Bang.

Mitelman doesn’t dwell on big metaphysical questions such as the nature of God or ultimate reality. Instead, he turns toward age-old rituals — the songs, stories and ceremonies that have been practiced within Jewish communities for centuries. Why do we return to these rituals year after year?

At a time when many people have abandoned organized religion, often describing themselves as “spiritual but not religious,” Mitelman says Judaism is more akin to being “religious but not spiritual.” In this conversation, we explore the power of ritual — and how shared practices can create meaning and build community.

This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.

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00:00:00 A Shabbat Ritual in Tuscany
00:04:10 Torah as Poetry, Not Science
00:09:15 Genesis and the Big Bang
00:19:57 God, Ritual, and Community

Can you imagine being a tree? Robert Moor has spent years trying—climbing into their canopies, studying their biology and learning to see trees in ways most of us don’t. He considers himself a “tree person.”

Moor believes that when you spend a lot of time in trees, time slows down—and branching and pruning can become life lessons. He’s interested not just in how trees grow, but in what they might teach us about ourselves. In his book In Trees, he says his goal isn’t to anthropomorphize trees but to “arborize” humanity.

Moor has taken his obsession with trees to unusual places: climbing to the tops of giant sequoias; traveling to Tokyo to meet master bonsai artists; becoming a “tree sitter” to protest an oil pipeline. He’s fascinated by “family trees” and Darwin’s Tree of Life, and by our own evolutionary history in the trees of Africa. He traveled to Ethiopia to see Lucy, the famous 3-million-year-old fossil skeleton, and to Tanzania to sleep in a chimpanzee nest. (It was a miserable experience.)

He knows something about living among trees: 13 years ago, he and his husband moved from New York City to a cabin in the woods of British Columbia—and never left.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:07:20 Climbers and Bonsai Masters
00:22:15 Environmentalism's Shadow History
00:28:45 Sleeping in a Chimpanzee Nest
00:37:20 Tree Sitters and Hope

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Rev. Dr. Melanie Harris is a professor of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies at Wake Forest University, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the founders of ecowomanism — a theology and environmental philosophy centering the voices, wisdom, and spiritual practices of Black women and women of color.

In this conversation, Harris traces her own eco-memories back to Dearfield, Colorado, one of the historic Black-owned farming settlements founded by families who migrated west during the Great Migration — including her own grandparents. She reflects on growing up with a rare and precious connection to land and growing things, even as her family navigated the very real dangers racism posed to simply being outdoors in rural America.

Harris speaks candidly about how, in many African American communities, painful histories tied to slavery and cotton have led families to intentionally distance children from the land — a protective severing that ecowomanism seeks to gently repair. Drawing on her mother's practice of singing and humming to plants, she describes music, spirituality and land stewardship as deeply entwined threads of Black religious life.

She also talks about the hidden ecological history of Black women and why it matters to see  women like Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer not just as liberators and Civil Rights leaders, but as environmentalists who understood the connection between racial justice and earth justice. 

The episode closes with a meditation on the high desert of New Mexico, where the conversation was recorded – a portrait of land, memory, grief and grace held together.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation. 

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:00 Roots, Roses and Ecowomanism
00:10:55 Harriet Tubman, Environmentalist
00:17:30 The Lynching Tree and What Needs Repair
00:27:10 The Divine Feminine and the Desert

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How do you find joy in suffering? That’s one of the questions Christian Wiman explores in his poetry and his life.

The former editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman is the author of seven books of poetry, including his latest, The Dance. He also teaches at Yale Divinity School. He’s been called “the most important Christian writer in America,” though his relationship with God is marked by uncertainty as much as faith. That tension runs through his poetry, where mystical experience, doubt, suffering, and joy continually collide.

His understanding of mortality is also shaped by a 20-year battle with cancer. Diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma and initially given only a few years to live, Wiman has come close to death several times. Yet he speaks about suffering not simply as something to endure, but as a strange territory in which beauty and wonder can sometimes be found.

Wiman craves direct experiences of the world, but he finds that writing poetry helps him fully appreciate these fleeting moments of awe and wonder. A frosted hosta, an old candlestick, the trills of a red-winged blackbird—small encounters like these can open onto deeper questions about meaning, eternity, and what Wordsworth called “seeing into the life of things.”

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00:00:00 Intro
00:02:40 Poetry, Awe and Wonder
00:15:10 Twenty Years Battling Cancer
00:21:55 Joy in Suffering
00:30:45 Seeing Into the Life of Things
00:39:40 A Last Poem and Farewell

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Links:

For thousands of years, people have dreamed of walking off the map — lighting out for the remote unknown, into landscapes untouched and untamed. The classic wilderness quest is as old as literature itself: you go into the wild, and you come out changed. It's woven into ancient spiritual texts, medieval myths, and European accounts of the so-called "New World."

But wilderness is an idea as slippery as it is powerful — and wilderness preservation is a complicated and often costly ideal. 

That's the territory Cal Flyn explores in her new book, The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness. An award-winning writer, Flyn has traveled — often alone — into some of the most remote and forbidding places on Earth: a desert monastery on Mount Sinai, deep into the Amazon rainforest, up a Tibetan mountain pass, and inside an erupting Icelandic volcano. She gets there by river skiff, deep-sea submersible, helicopter, and horseback, and along the way she finds moments of sheer wonder — and real danger.

We talk with Flyn about the history of this ancient idea and why humans keep chasing it. With nearly 8 billion people on the planet, almost no place is truly untouched. So what IS wilderness? Why do we keep seeking it? And who pays the price? 

Plus: 

Steve talks with legendary poet and environmental writer Gary Snyder — now 96, once a friend of the Beats and a Zen apprentice in 1950s Japan — about his classic book The Practice of the Wild. Snyder also reads two poems. This is an excerpt from an archival conversation.  

The original aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. This Wonder Cabinet episode was not funded, endorsed or affiliated with Wisconsin Public Media or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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00:00:00 In Search of Wilderness
00:03:00 Cal Flyn on The Savage Landscape
00:32:40 The Sublime, Taboos and Sacred Groves
00:49:55 From the TTBOOK Archive: Gary Snyder
01:00:15 Credits and Farewell

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What if consciousness isn't something that emerges from the brain—but is embedded in the fabric of reality itself?

That's the provocative idea behind panpsychism— that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos. Philosopher Philip Goff, one of panpsychism’s leading advocates, argues that it offers the best solution to one of science's deepest mysteries: how consciousness arises at all. We also hear  from novelist Philip Pullman, whose  fantasy series His Dark Materials was partly inspired by panpsychism. 

Goff reflects on another surprising development in his own thinking: his recent turn toward the Eastern Orthodox Church and what he calls "heretical Christianity.” He also describes how a profound  psychedelic experience shook him to the core—and may have revealed a deeper reality. 

The first interview with Goff was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. The interview with Philip Pullman originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. This Wonder Cabinet episode was not funded, endorsed or affiliated with Wisconsin Public Media or the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:00 What Is Panpsychism?
00:17:30 Heretical Christianity
00:29:40 A Psychedelic Awakening
00:38:25 The Conscious Universe, Confirmed

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