Maria Popova's Figuring (2020) is turning out to be a very timely and provocative book. It relates the lives and intersections of lives of some people one has heard of and knows something about (Hawthorne, Melville, Emily Dickinson, Rachel Carson)...) and some others of whom one maybe knew hazily but didn't have any particular appreciation for (the astronomer Maria Mitchell, the gadfly Margaret Fuller, the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, Johannes Kepler, William Whewell) and many other characters who play bit parts (Emerson, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Mary Somerville, Walt Whitman, Caroline Herschel...). I'm learning a lot, and finding reason to question some of what I thought I knew.

Along the way Popova quotes part of a poem by Lucille Clifton, of whom I knew nothing:

won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model
[...]
i made it up
here on this bridge between 
starshine and clay

Here's the whole thing, just 8 more lines
https://poets.org/poem/wont-you-celebrate-me

"this bridge between starshine and clay..." 
my god what a vision of Life.