/reader

 

One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.

It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.

A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning.

Jarod Anderson also turns to the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning in Something in the Woods Loves You (public library) — his poignant meditation on surviving the darkest recesses of human nature, the strange fusion of shame and sadness that gives depression its devastating power, by turning to the luminous and numinous in nature. Emerging from the pages is a lyrical love letter to how “imaginative empathy” heals and harmonizes our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the wonder of being alive.

Reflecting on the difficulty of interpreting his own life and on the myriad symbologies of the great blue heron — among them an ancient myth in which the bird dusts the surface of the water with golden starlight to attract bluegill — Anderson writes:

The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.

You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.

[…]

The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.

Whenever we think in absolutes, we ossify. Our freedom always lies in our flexibility, and because concepts like meaning and identity are not fixed, because, as Anderson observes, they “require our intentional participation,” they are “mercifully flexible.” They take the shape of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve, they abide by the messages we send ourselves through the omens we make of reality.

Watching the herons walking his local shoreline, feeling like they are sending him “an overt message” about the power of “quiet contemplation and self-determination,” Anderson writes:

The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.

There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment — these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.

For those of us who find consolation in the natural world, the sense of meaning has to do with contacting the numinous quality of sea and sky and songbird, of everything that makes this planet a world. You may call that contact wonder. You may call it magic. “If you don’t think herons are magic,” Anderson writes, “you need to broaden your definition of that word.”

Looking back on the bleak period when depression swept away the herons from the sky of his mind and voided the world of wonder, he reflects:

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

In the remainder of Something in the Woods Loves You, Anderson goes on to lens the search for meaning through a kaleidoscope of living wonders, from the sugar maple to the red-tailed hawk to the morel mushroom. Couple it with Loren Eiseley on warblers as a lens on the wonder of being, then revisit some of humanity’s greatest writers on nature as an antidote to depression and Terry Tempest Williams on the bird in the heart.

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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Whitman wrote in what may be the most elemental definition of solidarity — this tender recognition of our interdependence and fundamental kinship, deeper than sympathy, wider than love.

Half a century after Whitman’s atomic theory of belonging and half a century before Dr. King’s “inescapable network of mutuality,” the scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin (December 9, 1842– February 8, 1921) examined the meaning of solidarity in his visionary 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution (public library) — the culmination of his pioneering studies of the cooperation networks of social insects and his outrage at the destructive power structures and power struggles of human society, for which he was eventually imprisoned. After a dramatic escape, Kropotkin spent four decades in exile across Western Europe and went on to influence generations of thinkers with this radical insistence on cooperation and solidarity, not the struggle for power, as the true engine of survival and flourishing.

Having fallen under Darwin’s spell as a teenager, Kropotkin came to see in evolutionary science an optimistic model for the elevation of human conscience — in the history of life on Earth, across which organisms have continually improved their biological adaptation for survival, he found assurance for a better future forged by our continual moral improvement.

Unable to obtain the scientific education he yearned for, the young Kropotkin took a post as an officer in Siberia (where Dostoyevsky was serving in a labor camp), then used his military credentials to join geological expeditions studying glaciation, all the while witnessing staggering corruption and abuses of power in local government while the peasants governed themselves through deep bonds of mutual trust that seemed purer, more primal, and closer to nature than any political power structure.

Challenging the anthropocentric view of other animals, Kropotkin considers the deepest driving force beneath the harmony and coherence of nature:

To reduce animal sociability to love and sympathy means to reduce its generality and its importance, just as human ethics based upon love and personal sympathy only have contributed to narrow the comprehension of the moral feeling as a whole. It is not love to my neighbour — whom I often do not know at all — which induces me to seize a pail of water and to rush towards his house when I see it on fire; it is a far wider, even though more vague feeling or instinct of human solidarity and sociability which moves me. So it is also with animals. It is not love, and not even sympathy (understood in its proper sense) which induces a herd of ruminants or of horses to form a ring in order to resist an attack of wolves; not love which induces wolves to form a pack for hunting; not love which induces kittens or lambs to play, or a dozen of species of young birds to spend their days together in the autumn; and it is neither love nor personal sympathy which induces many thousand fallow-deer scattered over a territory as large as France to form into a score of separate herds, all marching towards a given spot, in order to cross there a river. It is a feeling infinitely wider than love or personal sympathy — an instinct that has been slowly developed among animals and humans in the course of an extremely long evolution, and which has taught animals and humans alike the force they can borrow from the practice of mutual aid and support, and the joys they can find in social life.

An epoch before Lewis Thomas speculated in his poetic case for why we are wired for friendship that “maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute,” Kropotkin adds:

Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each person from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.

Complement with Albert Camus on what solidarity means and Lewis Thomas’s forgotten masterpiece of perspective on how to live with our human nature, then revisit Kropotkin on how to reboot a complacent society and the art of putting your gift in the service of the world.

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

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The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter, astronomer Vera Rubin reflected: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”

Far from a mere diversion of the senses, beauty may just be the dialogue between nature and human nature — our most expressive language for loving the universe, for loving ourselves as fractals of the universe, for living wonder-smitten by reality. To find something beautiful is to find it interesting and meaningful in some way, often a way we can’t articulate — to render it significant and worthy of attention, to render it a wonder. In all of its forms — the beauty of a willow at night, the beauty of a noble act, the beauty of the imperfect face you love — beauty is what we find and what we create as we move through the world at our most fully human.

In 1955, the English marine biologist and poetic science writer N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) worked out the ideas that would later bloom into his perspectival masterpiece You and the Universe on the pages of another book. Despite a title very much a product of its time — a time before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliant unsexed the universal pronoun — Man’s Emerging Mind (public library) remains a singular and enduring reckoning with what makes us human, lensed through the majesty and mystery of beauty in all its forms, which pulsates beneath those qualities of mind we associate with terms like soul and spirit.

Aware of himself as an individual unique in the history of a universe he doesn’t fully understand yet living with questions common to “all of us who move and think and feel and whom time consumes,” Berrill writes in the twenty-first chapter, wonderfully titled “The Shape of Wonder”:

I know beauty but I do not know what it means. Keats said that beauty is truth and so did the Greeks, although the one was concerned with loveliness and the others mainly with intellect. I do know that whatever beauty is, whether it is the kind that is woven within the mind itself or is perceived without, on this earth only the human mind can sense it… And inasmuch as we ourselves, in body, brain or mind, are as integral a part of the universe as any star, it makes little difference whether we say beauty lies only in the mind of the beholder or otherwise. We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.

With an eye to the creative impulse that is part of our humanity, part of the true nature of the universe that we refract, he echoes poet Robinson Jeffers’s moving meditation on moral beauty and adds:

Somehow, as our brains have grown beyond a certain complexity and size, beauty emerged both as perception and as creation. We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can. And we know it in many forms and not only in sublimated senses — we know it when love becomes selfless and solicitude becomes compassion. We see it in moral stature and in hope and courage. We see it whenever the transcending quality of growth is clear and unmistakable, knowing that only in such growth do we find our own individual happiness.

Berrill considers one thing beauty shares with love (which both share with the first of William James’s four features of transcendent experiences):

We can express them with words but cannot define them — we can only say that this and this are included but that is not, and wordlessly we all recognise the truth of it. Speech is limited, no matter what the language…. For in our hearts we understand more than we can possibly talk about.

A century after Walt Whitman called himself a “kosmos” and insisted that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Berrill intimates that this ineffable knowledge is a way of knowing ourselves, of anchoring ourselves to time and meaning as we evolve over the course of a lifetime and face our finitude. In consonance with Annie Dillard’s piercing insistence that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” he writes:

Your day’s activity, mental and physical, is a part of you and by extension you are all that you have ever been — like an unfinished symphony.

[…]

I believe… that during the closing notes of an individual life the question, if any, should be not do I have an immortal soul and what comes next, but how much of a soul have I grown? Whether individual consciousness persists at all… all that lives, all that has lived, retains its value and its meaning… I believe the past lives, that the present is eternal, and the future immanent; that we take it as an indivisible whole and that our obsession with the sweep and drama of history, our probing with fossils and other symbols of time, and our efforts to constructs theories of evolution of life and matter, are all in keeping with the craving to recreate in the human mind the unity of the universe in all its dimensions. The fact that we are so concerned and make such attempts to do this is much more significant than the results we may obtain. Space and time unite in the mind, in the organism, and in the universe as one all-inclusive whole.

It is with this awareness that the Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made his koan-like deathbed insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” Beauty, Berrill suggests, is how we rise out of our transient individual lives to contact this transcendent wholeness, to trust it and thus to trust ourselves. As such, it is a form of faith — the faith we most need to fully inhabit our lives, entwined as they are in that “inescapable network of mutuality.”

Berrill writes:

We need faith, a faith in ourselves as human beings and not as members of this or that race or religion or state or class of society. We need no faith in supernatural forces. We need only to recognise that our knowledge of the universe through our senses and our knowledge of the universe through our own inward nature show that it is orderly, moral and beautiful, that it is akin to intelligence, that love and hope belong in it as fully as light itself, and that the power and will of the human mind is but a symptom of reality; that we, when we are most human, most rational, most aware of love and beauty, reflect and represent the spirit of the universe. That should be enough.

And isn’t the sense of enough the triumph of life?

donating = loving

For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.

newsletter

The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.