Ynes Mexia

26 April 2017: “And those plants are still with us—in drawers mostly, herbariums, old museums, the basements of botanical societies—dried and preserved, labeled, meticulously catalogued, glued just so to white pages now yellow with age, like she had learned to do in a classroom at the age of 52. And each one of them—each flower she saw poking out of the dirt and said ‘That one,’ each leaf she had stop on tiptoes to take, each blade of grass she had pulled from the hillside with her fingertips—is a moment in her life and a choice she made.” --Nate DiMeo in this wonderful episode of The Memory Palace.

Every episode of The Memory Palace is a work of art, but this one--about someone I hadn't heard of before who, in Nate's words, didn't have a very dramatic life--is exceptional. It's a profound meditation on age, agency, choice, and the ways we can effect the world. Wonderful.