Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter someone with such powerful and generous light in their eyes that they rekindle the lost light within you and return it magnified; someone whose calm, kind, steady gaze penetrates the very center of your being and, refusing to look away from even the most shadowy parts of you, falls upon you like a benediction.
That we can do this for each other, but that it happens so rarely, is both the great miracle and the great tragedy, for there is no loneliness like the loneliness of having your light unmet.
The great Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue (January 1, 1956–January 4, 2008) takes up these immense and intimate questions in the opening pages of his altogether wonderful final book To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (public library) — his parting gift to the world, published just before his untimely death, celebrating “the gift that a blessing can be, the doors it can open, the healing and transfiguration it can bring” and inviting us to “rediscover our power to bless one another.”
Art by Coralie Bickford Smith from The Fox and the Star
He writes:
There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing.
The even greater blessing is our presence here together, as mirrors and magnifiers of each other’s light. “Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you,” O’Donohue reminds us. At their best, at their rarest, those moments of profound light-to-light connection are thresholds, portals to transformation, invitations to a more radiant life.
With an eye to “that tenuous territory of change that we must traverse when a threshold invites us,” O’Donohue writes:
Without warning, thresholds can open directly before our feet… In the ecstasy and loneliness of one’s life, there are certain times when blessing is nearer to us.
Figure study for The Spirit of Light, Edwin Austin Abbey, 1989.
To step across the threshold with courage and openheartedness is to honor the truth and sanctity of our experience, of our light — it is to bless ourselves:
The structures of our experience are the windows into the divine. When we are true to the call of experience, we are true to God.
Complement with a blind hero of the French resistance on how to live in light, a Baldwin-lensed meditation on the light between us, and David Whyte’s “Blessing for the Light,” inspired by John O’Donohue, then revisit O’Donohue on why we fall in love and the essence of friendship.
“To go all the way from a clone of archaebacteria, in just 3.7 billion years, to the B-Minor Mass and the Late Quartets, deserves a better technical term for the record than randomness,” the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas wrote in his forgotten masterpiece of perspective.
This is the great astonishment: that we come from a lineage of chance events stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, that however precisely we may trace the causality of the forces and phenomena leading to the improbable fact of us, still the most powerful and enchanting experiences of our lives — those things that didn’t have to exist: music, beauty, love — are beyond the reach of why.
“Why is the universe? To shape God,” wrote Octavia Butler, who favored science over religion. “Why is God? To shape the universe.”
Perhaps God is just the name we give the wonders beyond why.
Twelve-wired bird-of-paradise (Seleucidis melanoleuca). Photograph: Tim Laman. (Available as a print.)
Among this world’s most staggering whyless wonders are the birds-of-paradise, native to the island of New Guinea — strange shamans of transformation with plumage so beautiful and behavior so baffling, so far beyond the evolutionary demands of sexual selection, that no causal account of their speciation seems adequate. And yet here they are — here is beauty that didn’t have to exist, here is nature turned supranatural, here is wonder beyond why.
Birds-of-paradise (Epimachus Ellioti) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Close kin of the crow and cousins of the bowerbird — itself a living astonishment — the birds-of-paradise puzzled Darwin. He struggled to understand the need for such ostentatious displays of beauty in the context of evolutionary theory — feathers so long and lavish that they constrict flight, making the birds vastly more vulnerable to predators; courtship dances so extraordinary and effortful that mate selection, so much simpler and safer in all other bird species, becomes not the blind mechanism of gene propagation but a spectacle of wonder.
Wilson’s bird-of-paradise (Cicinnnurus respublica). Photograph: Tim Laman. (Available as a print.)
While Darwin was desperately searching for an explanation in the laboratory of the mind, Alfred Russell Wallace chose the observatory of the world and set out to see these living marvels with his own eyes.
Born before photography, having only written accounts and dead specimens to work with, he must have intuited that the mystery of the birds-of-paradise was the mystery of life itself — a mystery shaped by the complexity of context and the urgency of connection, best apprehended by living observation.
Birds-of-paradise (Dephyllodes Chrysoptera) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Five years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, fomented by the joint paper on natural selection he had written with Wallace, the thirty-one-year-old Wallace undertook the first of several voyages searching for the birds-of-paradise. In the five years he spent living in and around New Guinea, he became the first European to observe these strange and wondrous creatures in their native habitat, to see them dance and hear them sing.
“It seems as if Nature had taken precautions that these her choicest treasures should not be made too common, and thus be undervalued,” he rued after managing to obtain only five specimens in all his travels. He returned thinking them “the most wonderful productions of Nature.”
Recounting his voyages in the 1869 book The Malay Archipelago, which he dedicated to Darwin, Wallace exulted:
[Their] exquisite beauty of form and colour and strange developments of plumage are calculated to excite the wonder and admiration of the most civilized and the most intellectual of mankind, and to furnish inexhaustible materials for study to the naturalist, and for speculation to the philosopher.
Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Decora) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
But while his book sparked an intellectual interest in the birds-of-paradise, words failed to convey the feeling-tone of wonder — this most enchanted passageway between eye and brain, between sight and spirit. It was the 1888 completion of the long-labored Birds of New Guinea by John Gould — whose wife Elizabeth had catapulted him into fame with her stunning drawings of the birds of the Himalayas half a century earlier — that achieved this.
By the time the book was published, both John and Elizabeth were dead. But the consummate illustrations in it became the standard lithographs reproduced in countless subsequent volumes on the birds-of-paradise.
Birds-of-paradise (Seleucides Negricans) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Sanguinea) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Papuana) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Birds-of-paradise (Paradisea Raggiana) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Birds-of-paradise (Parotia Lawesi) by John Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Still, illustration could only capture the static beauty of the birds — not the dynamic astonishment of their behavior: their courtship dances, their strange songs, their flash transformation from ordinary bird to extraordinary feathered deity. It took more than a century for the young science of photography to catalyze the art of moving images and give us a way of conveying wonder across space and time.
Evolutionary biologist Ed Scholes and National Geographic wildlife photographer Tim Laman spent a decade documenting for the first time the thirty-nine known species that dwell in the rainforests of New Guinea, detailing these living wonders in their book Birds of Paradise: Revealing the World’s Most Extraordinary Birds (public library) and contributing to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s excellent Birds-of-Paradise Project.
Western Parotia bird-of-paradise (Parotia sefilata). Photograph: Tim Laman. (Available as a print.)
Red bird-of-paradise. Photograph: Tim Laman.
Emerging from the majesty and mystery of the birds-of-paradise, from the disorienting sense that we may never discern what evolution intended with such bewildering extravagance, is the urgent humility physicist Richard Feynman captured in the recognition that “the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.”
That we may never know why such a wonder exists only deepens the loveliness of the mystery that is always haunting knowledge — the mystery we are.
The sunshine of life springs from twin suns. We may call them love and art. We may call them connection and creativity. Both can take many forms. Both, if they are worth their salt and we ours, ask us to show up as our whole selves. Both are instruments of unselfing.
It is often in the cradle of friendship — a word not to be used carelessly — that our creative energies are strengthened and renewed. Through its tendrils, we find community — a place where our own creative work is reflected and refracted through that of others to cast a shimmering radiance of mutual magnification that borders on magic.
Art by Arthur Rackham for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, 1906. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
This vital relationship between creativity and connection has been tensed and twisted in the era of Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, where self-marketing so readily masquerades as “friend”-ship.
In 1950, epochs before our social media were but a glimmer in the eye of the possible, Henry Miller (December 26, 1891–June 7, 1980) reckoned with the seedling of our modern predicament in his meditation on art and life. Considering the downfall of art in his own epoch, when the age of publicity and mass media was just beginning to maim culture, he laments the state of the creative community:
No communication. No real intercommunication. No concern for the vital, subtle things which mean everything to a writer, painter or musician. We live in a void spanned by the most intricate and elaborate means of communication. Each one occupies a planet to himself. But the messages never get through.
After honing his ideas on two decades of living, Miller took up the subject again in his uncommonly wonderful 1968 book To Paint Is to Love Again. In a passage just as hauntingly true of the compulsion for social media “likes,” he writes:
How distressing it is to hear young painters talking about dealers, shows, newspaper reviews, rich patrons, and so on. All that comes with time — or will never come. But first one must make friends, create them through one’s work.
Henry Miller: The Hat and the Man from To Paint Is to Love Again.
This mutually sustaining circle of creative kinship begins with a single lifeline of connection. Those of us who are lucky to have it in our own lives can easily identify it, always with a swell of gratitude. Miller writes:
Usually the artist has two life-long companions, neither of his own choosing… — poverty and loneliness. To have a friend who understands and appreciates your work, one who never lets you down but who becomes more devoted, more reverent, as the years go by, that is a rare experience. It takes only one friend… to work miracles.
Complement with David Whyte on the deepest meaning of friendship, Kahlil Gibran on the building blocks of meaningful connection, and this almost unbearably lovely vintage illustrated ode to friendship, then revisit Henry Miller on the measure of a life well lived and the value of and antidote to despair.
Hello Reader! This is the weekly email digest of 
