Every year on this day I am astonished by how much time has passed since my dad was here. Today it’s 23 years. There’s a part of me that still cannot wrap my mind around it. Every year on this day I am also astonished by the outpouring from people who still read his work, still quote him, still learn from him, still mourn him, and still love him, too. Thank you. It means more to me than I can say.
I cannot begin to express how proud I am to be this woman’s daughter. I know I say she’s brilliant a lot, but she really truly astonishes me with what and how she creates. The new season of #cosmos is profoundly hopeful and deeply moving. And it’s her vision. I’m so excited for everyone to see it starting March 9th 🌌♥️ #cosmospossibleworlds #anndruyan
This beautiful, enlightening, hopeful book written by my beautiful, enlightening, hopeful mother comes out on Tuesday 🌌♥️ #cosmospossibleworlds
My mother sent me this a few days ago. She found it while sorting through some things. I can’t stop looking at it. In part because my daughter is now about the age I am here. I keep finding her face in mine. If you read my book you know I love and miss the two gentlemen in this photo, my dad and my Grandpa Harry, very much. (And also that I feel rather strongly about photo booths.) So #stayhome and maybe find some lost treasures.
Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful, brilliant mom, and to all the wise, clever, loving moms in my life and to all the moms throughout the eons, going back beyond the horizon of names and details we have to the earliest humans, to ancestors who lived in the trees and beyond. Think of all those links in that unbroken chain, all crucial for each of us to arrive at this moment. Thank you ♥️
Kids today, always with the selfies.
At my first job out of college I had a friend who left the office early every Wednesday to attend what I’ll call a “self-help group”. Thinking I was funny, I would say, “ok have fun at your cult meeting!” One day I saw the look on his face and realized how extremely rude I was being. I apologized and agreed to attend an introductory meeting to make amends, and I guess, to prove my open-mindedness. In the meeting for new potential members we had to go around and say why we were there. I only said a colleague had invited me. A brash, kind of obnoxious older man next to me was more honest. “I’m here because I’m trying to sleep with a gal I know who comes here.” Soon the person leading the conversation was asking more personal questions. “What’s the problem in your life you are battling? What do you need to change to move forward?” When it was my turn I was suddenly overcome with emotion. I couldn’t believe I was crying in this weird meeting surrounded by strangers. “My father died when I was young and I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it.” Before the leader of the meeting could finish saying that was just the kind of the thing they could help with, the older man interjected, “Just get married and have kids of your own and you’ll be fine”. I was like 23, definitely not ready for that. His advice felt aggressive and inappropriate. I never went back but I remembered that day. For many years Father’s Day was the worst day of the year for me, full of constant reminders of what I didn’t have anymore. Then 3 years ago my husband and I had our beautiful little girl and something did indeed shift. Suddenly the idea of fatherhood was about my husband’s kind, silly, thoughtful, tender relationship with her. Celebrating that gives me so much joy. I still miss my dad. I still wish he was here. But now I feel a new appreciation for the love and attention he gave me, and a sense of profound gratitude for all the great dads past, present and future. And today, overall, I feel very lucky. And astonished that unpleasant stranger was sort of right. If you’re reading this and you’ve lost your dad or your relationship is hard, please know I’m thinking of you ♥️ #fathersday
Ding dong! ➡️ Hello! It’s me on @cosmosontv again playing my grandmother Rachel and feeling like a time traveler. Did you see me? 👵🏼🌌 #cosmos #cosmospossibleworlds
Ding dong! ➡️ Hello! It’s me on @cosmosontv again playing my grandmother Rachel and feeling like a time traveler. Did you see me? 👵🏼🌌 #cosmos #cosmospossibleworlds
Do I look a little nervous in this picture? Well, I am. The two lovely women I’m with host a very successful podcast called ‘That’s So Retrograde’. It explores and celebrates lots of things about which I am openly critical because they are not evidence-based: astrology, past lives, crystals. Back in October one of my lifelong besties @amyrosoffdavis brought @ssimbari and @elizabethkott to hear me talk at @booksoup. They were warm and enthusiastic and invited me to be on their show. I agreed immediately but some part of me worried that by accepting I’d be implicitly denying our deep philosophical differences, somehow endorsing their views. On the other hand, I didn’t want to cut myself off from an opportunity to communicate my perspective to people who might not otherwise hear it. So I went on @soretrograde. Stephanie and Elizabeth had read my book very carefully. They were inquisitive, extremely gracious and eager to hear my skepticism. That’s no small thing. So few people are open to hearing why you don’t believe what they believe. We had a truly great conversation and a lot of fun. I left very grateful to Stephanie and Elizabeth for this opportunity, (but also wishing I’d remembered to say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”). I don’t know if I’ll change any minds but I never want to be accused of only preaching to the (un)converted. There are so many people who see themselves as #spiritualbutnotreligious but never get access to a scientific worldview that’s joyful as opposed to cynical. Long story short, even if we don’t agree I want to talk to you and maybe even be friends. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, Stephanie and Elizabeth, for having me on your podcast ✨ The episode is out now and would love to know what you think.
Happy Valentines Day to the creatures of this dot. And happy 30th birthday to this photograph, which inspired what I consider one of the most meaningful poems ever written. I still hope this perspective can help make us understand how lucky we are to have one another on this tiny island in the great wide vastness. Let’s find a way to love each other here 💙 #palebluedot
The mind-blowing, breathtaking, hope-filled new season of #COSMOS premieres Monday at 8/7c on @natgeochannel. I am so f*cking excited for you to see it. And so profoundly proud of my mama for creating this stirring, uplifting vision of the beauty of science. #cosmospossibleworlds #hope
The wonderful @stephanielacava interviewed me about love and skepticism for the new issue of @thevioletbook and @daliaymakeup changed my life by parting my hair in the middle for the photos. Thanks so much to all involved, especially my dear @leithclark 🤎
We have decided years end and begin at very particular times. Different cultures have different moments when the years change over and we give ourselves an appointed time to reflect and start anew. In many traditions these turning points take place in autumn or spring. But in the Gregorian calendar, the one that is most widely used on this planet, the new year begins nowish, winter in the northern hemisphere, summer in the southern one. It’s arbitrary but I’m grateful for a chance to feel time passing and process all the changes during the most recent revolution around the sun. It’s been a very exciting year for me. In no small part because I got to work with and meet so many interesting people. Thank you to absolutely everyone who helped make my book possible, everyone who read it, who wrote to me (I will do my best to reply if I haven’t yet, I promise!), came to my events or follows me here. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, no matter when it starts or what we call it. #happynewyear #forsmallcreaturessuchaswe
This cannot just be a one day thing that makes us feel like we’re doing something before we move on.
Recently, while planning the online conversation I did with the lovely @michaelakalowski for the @brisbane_writers_festival I learned about an Australian ritual that I had never heard of before. Michaela taught me that at the beginning of events there is sometimes an “acknowledgment of country”, a show of respect for the particular Aboriginal clan whose land is being inhabited. It’s a brief but meaningful recognition of the people who lived there first and implicitly how it was lost through colonialism and imperialism. What if we did this in the United States? What if we spent just a moment before a conference or a concert forcing ourselves to face our history? What if we made ourselves talk about how this nation really came to be? What if before a session of Congress or an Oval Office address we as a nation acknowledged we are conducting our business, say, on the land of Nacotchtank in buildings built by the forced labor of enslaved people? How might that change our perspective and inform our decisions? I don’t know, but I’ll be thinking about it tomorrow while I re-read Frederick Douglass’s essay “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” on Nauset land. #fourthofjuly
Happy Solstice, fellow Earthlings ✨I’m so grateful for that funny little axial tilt of ours and all the beauty and variation it bestows upon us. For those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere, in all this present darkness, please don’t forget that “starting tomorrow the days will start getting longer again, and slowly the plants will bloom again, the sunshine will return. Summer is coming.” It is intrinsically wonderful. It requires no faith. And for eons, in one fashion or another, we’ve been celebrating it. 🕯🌌☀️#happysolstice #forsmallcreaturessuchaswe
This is the sign I’ve been using while protesting. This is what I believe. Tides do turn. Change is coming. Let’s keep going.
Thanks to the wonders of science and technology I made friends with a gifted artist who lives across a great ocean. She sent me this beautiful creation of a woman and one of the Voyager spacecrafts in the ocean of the universe. And somehow it all feels like a little poem about vast oceans and ways small creatures such as we find to send messages across them. 📡🌌🖤 Thank you @paulina.mocna, from the bottom of my heart, for this. #voyager
For those of us in a position of privilege, for those who do not live with the fear that any small daily interaction could lead to our murder because of the color of our skin alone, but who seek to understand and move this country toward meaningful change, may I recommend these two excellent books.
We very much enjoyed a concerningly nice day today in Boston.
A little behind-the-scenes from the final episode of #cosmospossibleworlds which airs tonight on @natgeochannel and depicts, as my mom would say, “a vision of the future we can still have”. (And yes that’s me as my grandmother Rachel one last time.) #cosmos #worldsfair #tunein
I am very excited because I’m doing my first ever Instagram Live tonight with @celinecelines on @theslowfactory. We’ll be discussing the intersection of science and spirituality, something that feels especially relevant in this strange, scary moment we’re in. Come say hi ✨ #slowtalks
Thank you to @roxannefequiere, @lololevine, @audreygelman and everyone at @the.wing for having me at the gorgeous new Bryant Park location to talk about BOOKS! It was such a fantastic evening. And thank you to every single person who has come to hear me talk over the last seven weeks, at 13 events in 10 cities. I have had the most wonderful time meeting you all, hearing your excellent questions and your unforgettably moving personal stories. I can’t wait for lots more of that in 2020. Exciting things ahead! #forsmallcreaturessuchaswe
