<html aria-label="message body"><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div dir="auto" style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet </font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">You wouldn’t have bet on it,<br>the battered rock<br>orbiting a star<br>from the discount bin<br>of the universe,<br>wouldn’t have guessed<br>that it would bloom<br>mitochondria and music,<br>that it would mushroom<br>mountains and minds,</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">and the hummingbird wing<br>whirring a hundred times faster<br>than your eye can blink,</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">and your eye that took<br>five hundred million years<br>from trilobite to telescope,</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">and the unhurried orange lichen<br>growing on the black boulder<br>two hundred times more slowly<br>than the tectonic plates beneath<br>are drifting apart</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">and the marbled orca<br>carrying her dead calf<br>down the entire edge<br>of the continent,<br>carrying the weight<br>of consciousness</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;">and consciousness<br>how it windows<br>this tenement<br>of breath and bone<br>with wonder,<br>how it hovers over everything,<br>gigantic and unnecessary,<br>like music,<br>like love.</font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;"><br></font></p><p style="line-height: 25.5px; font-size: 16px;"><font size="5" style="font-size: 22px;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>- Maria Popova</font></p></div></body></html>