The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You

The Resilience of Uncertainty: How to Hold the Universe in You By Maria Popova “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave certainty, only to discover over and over that it is a mirage, that the love of life is rooted in the courage of uncertainty — because certainty doesn’t allow for surprise, but everything we know of life is the product of the wildest bet that prevailed against the odds of otherwise so we may exist; because certainty thrives on clear category and neat classification, but the most meaningful experiences we have inhabit the liminal spaces between the common categories of what we can name. NASA engineer Lisa Rosenberg offers a lovely ode to the life-force of uncertainty in the title poem from her altogether ravishing collection Weeds and Stars (public library) — the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe: WEEDS AND STARS by Lisa RosenbergWeeds and stars and everything between, from ocean dwellers to accretion disks — resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented — recall the transience of clouds.The ocean dwellers and accretion disks, the finest river stones and faintest moons recall the transience of clouds, of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.The faintest moon, the finest river stone, the lucid silences at play in dreams find harmony at work in gorgeous noise. Let night and day be open quandariesin play with silences and lucid dreams. Forget the cries for certainty, the heft of night and day and open quandaries, the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.The case for certainty forgets the weft of wholes, of fragments and resiliency, imperfect music of imperfect spheres, the weediest of stars, the in-betweens. In our yearning for certainty, we have tried to reduce the cosmos to clockwork, to side with probability over surprise, and yet again and again it is the break in the pattern, the chaos in the order, that creates the conditions for possibility. The most brutal benediction of life is that every experience is unrepeatable, every organism irreplicable, every existence a singular phenomenon that has never before occurred and will never again occur in the entire history and future of the universe — something Rosenberg channels in another poem from the book, reverencing the most poetic of numbers: PRAISE ON PI DAY by Lisa RosenbergTo praise the nonrepeating, I will praise the universe: each smooth circumference, each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.The universe, each smooth circumference of our daily mess, won’t fit in simple bins of life and not-life. They’re everywhere and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is notour daily mess, unfit for simple bins, but each repeated lesson learned anew and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not that we forget, but that our learning shiftswith each repeated lesson learned anew. The aster blooms. The supernova cools. We might forget that all our learning shifts into the pupil of the coming day.The aster blooms. The supernova cools its jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face into the pupil of a coming day where praise is nonrepeating, and we praise. Couple with another poem of praise for the improbable, then revisit The Universe in Verse. — Published August 20, 2026 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/08/20/weeds-and-stars-lisa-rosenberg/ — ABOUT CONTACT SUPPORT SUBSCRIBE Newsletter RSS CONNECT Facebook Twitter Instagram Tumblr