Yes, we spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. The boundary is so difficult to discern because, when all the stories fall away, there is no boundary — only a fluid, permeable membrane that is constantly shifting depending on the stories we tell ourselves about what we are and where we belong. Lynn Margulis captured this in ecological and evolutionary terms when she observed that “life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.” Dr. King captured the sociological equivalent in his insistence that “we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” Whitman captured its most elemental and most existential dimensions in that immortal line: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

When we fail to see the connections between things, we fail to anticipate the consequences of any one thing. A century before we began slaying entire ecosystems with pesticides meant to eradicate individual species, before we began tinkering with individual genes in the complex cathedral of the genome, the naturalist John Muir exulted that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” — an exultation that now reads as an admonition.

How to unblind ourselves to this cosmos of connection and its attendant forcefield of consequence is what Jenn Shapland explores in her essay collection Thin Skin (public library) — “a corporeal account of how thin the membrane is between each of us and one another, between each of us and the world outside,” fomented by the medical reality of her epidermis missing a layer: a diagnosis of literally thin skin.

Art by Lia Halloran for The Universe in Verse.

With an eye to the embodied metaphor of her condition, Shapland writes:

There is no “outside”… The world is a part of our cellular makeup… we impact it with every tiny choice we make.

[…]

I began to see what I now think of as literalized metaphors for my entanglement, my complicity, all over my life: in my dermatological diagnosis of “thin skin,” in my friends’ having babies as the world burned, in the crystals cropping up everywhere to heal us of something, in my own sense of vulnerability and my desire to feel safe. I began to question the idea of myself as a being in need of protection, indeed as something that could be protected. Nothing can protect us… It struck me as I wrote that I was utterly vulnerable to every other person, every other creature on Earth, and they were also vulnerable to me… I began to seek other ways of understanding the self that might be more useful than this shivering, weak thing we must shore up against the world.

And yet out of that singular vulnerability comes a singular strength — liberated from the standard boundaries between self and world, which serve as culture’s safety valve constricting what is possible and permissible, one is free to imagine “alternatives to our limited narratives about family, love, labor, longing, pleasure, safety, and legacy.” A century after D.H. Lawrence reverenced the strength of sensitivity, Shapland writes:

To be thin-skinned is to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.

What she notices above all are the connections between things, the Rube Goldberg machine of consequences that binds past and future, self and other, here and everywhere else. She writes about Los Alamos and Rachel Carson, about the traps of parenthood and the paradoxes of self-compassion, about mending clothes and mending hearts. Emerging from the essays is a reminder, both haunting and assuring, that in this increasingly fractured and fragmented world, life remains defiantly indivisible.

Art by Violeta Lópiz from At the Drop of a Cat

There is power in such porousness — a heightened ability to question the structures that make for fragmentation, perhaps none more tyrannical than the idea that the nuclear family is the optimal unit of belonging and connection, an idea rooted in our touching yearning for immortality despite our creaturely finitude: passing on our genes and values as a way of perpetuating ourselves beyond our mortal limits. Watching her friends freeze their eggs and go through rounds of IVF, Shapland reflects:

If we extend our idea of family beyond the individual to the wider world of creatures and ecosystems, we can begin to ask what we want for them. From them. We can begin to see ourselves in relation. Acknowledging and reckoning with death — with the limit on our existence, with the fact that we are temporary — can reframe what it means to live. What do we want to leave behind? What do we want to support, maintain, in the limited time we are here?

A beautiful answer comes from Shapland’s conversation with Marian Naranjo — a Native antinuclear activist from Santa Clara Pueblo, a stone’s throw from the birthplace of the atomic bomb. With an eye to the ancestral knowledge of how to live in peace and harmony — knowledge that has suffered the erasures of colonialism and capitalism — Naranjo envisions a new epoch of remembering what we have forgotten: how to be caretakers of connection. Sitting across from Shapland in the embodied space of mutuality, she echoes Ursula K. Le Guin’s passionate case for the transformative power of real human conversation and reflects:

That’s the next circle, that circle of balance. Where we do put back our heaven and earth, our heaven back on earth. Get it back. How do we do that? It’s this, it’s talking face-to-face. It’s doing more of this.

But somewhere along the arc of so-called progress, we forgot what indigenous cultures have known for millennia: that truth is a tapestry, no single thread of which can survive the wear and tear of reality in isolation, the reality against which truth must be continually tested in order to be true. This damaging isolationism haunts even the history of our understanding of the basic building blocks of life — the chemical elements that compose it, or discompose it.

The Radium Dance, 1904.

With an eye to the discovery of radioactivity and Marie Curie’s epochal work on radium, Shapland writes:

Soon after its discovery, radium became a multimillion-dollar business. For four decades, you could buy rejuvenating radium skin cream, lipstick, tea, bath salts, hair growth tonic, “a bag containing radium worn near the scrotum” that “was said to restore virility.” There was radium toothpaste to boost whitening. Radium therapy, called Curietherapy in France, began to be used to treat cancer. It was first inserted by fifty needles into breast tissue, or by radon “seeds” that caused serious reactions. There existed a “vaginal radium bomb consisting of a lead sphere supported by a rod for insertion” for cancer treatment. Marie and her daughter Irene took a radiological car to the front in World War I to X-ray soldiers. Later, she supplied radium bulbs to the French health service to treat the military and civilian wounded and sick with radium therapy.

The discovery of radioactivity is a story of willful ignorance, of knowing but longing not to know, pretending not to know, how powerful and damaging it was. Scientists and salespeople alike believed in its power to cure, to heal. Radium was damaging enough to kill cancer, to burn Pierre’s skin through the glass vial in his vest pocket, but somehow not thought to be damaging enough to kill the scientists handling it all day, the people brushing their teeth with it. Marie kept a vial on her nightstand to bask in its glow as she slept. She called it her child.

[…]

This scientific refusal to believe what is obvious because it cannot be proven, because it is technically uncertain, accompanies our understanding of toxic substances to this day.

This blindness to connection, causality, and the consequences of radioactivity is hardly surprising: To achieve what she achieved, against the odds of her time and place, Marie Curie had to be thick-skinned. Perhaps a thinner skin, with its attendant power of seeing the permeability and interdependence of things, would have saved her life, would have spared her the tragedy Adrienne Rich captured so poignantly in the final words of her magnificent tribute to Curie:

She died    a famous woman    denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds    came    from the same source as her power

Complement with Marie Howe’s poem “Singularity” — a stunning antidote to our illusion of separateness — and the young poet Marissa Davis’s inspired echo of it, serenading our elemental bond with nature and each other.

The highest and hardest task of life may be to become entirely ourselves — to continually purify and clarify who and what we are, shedding the shoulds of culture, convention, and expectation to discover the innermost musts: those deepest and truest callings of the authentic self, or what we might call soul. And yet the great paradox is that the self is not a fixity but a perpetual fluidity, reshaped by every experience we have: every love and every loss, every person we meet, every place we visit, and every book we read. And so it must be: “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living,” Virginia Woolf wrote, for she understood that the finest souls “are always the supplest.”

The exquisite challenge of becoming oneself but remaining supple is at the center of every life, but it is amplified in the creative life — there is no greater tragedy for an artist than to stagnate and stiffen into a fixity, a template of oneself that ceases to create and instead caters to a self-myth. “Are we going to ossify,” the young Emily Dickinson wrote rhetorically to her great love and muse at the outset of an uncommonly creative life, throughout which she refused to ossify, as a person and as an artist.

In Sweat — his magnificent history of exercise as a lens on the body and the soul — Bill Hayes offers an antidote to ossifying rooted in the parallels between creative practice and athletic training.

Group Apparatus by Alice Austen, 1893.

Drawing an analogy between the science of exercise and his own art — writing — he considers the six principles that sustain long-term personal fitness.

1. The Principle of Specificity is the idea that “what you train for is what you get” — if your goal is endurance, train for endurance; if your goal is strength, train for strength; if you aim to make your prose more musical, train your mind’s ear on musical writing; if you want to write better observations, train to make better observations. “Be specific in your work goals as much as in your workouts,” Hayes writes.
2. The Overload Principle requires that you “train a part of the body above the level to which it is accustomed” — it is the practice of pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and trying new things. Hayes calls its equivalent in the mind “creative cross-training.” Rilke understood this: “People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy,” he wrote in contemplating creativity. “But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.”
3. The Principle of Progression arises out of the Overload Principle, demanding that you move on as soon as you have mastered a new task. Georgia O’Keeffe knew this. “Making your unknown known is the important thing,” she wrote in her advice on being an artist, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”
4. The Principle of Accommodation takes effect in the absence of the Progression Principle: Without challenge, the body — or the spirit — settles into stagnation or, worse, complacency. David Bowie urged against this reflex toward comfort and homeostasis: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in,” he advised artists. “Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
5. The Principle of Reversibility is an admonition against the trap of accommodation — when you cease challenging yourself, the arc of your progress bends backward, undoing your gains. It almost doesn’t matter what you do to keep your system from falling out of shape — it need not be your primary workout, or your primary work. Virginia Woolf felt that her informal diary writing “loosens the ligaments” for her formal literary writing. “One must do something, anything, to keep the creative and intellectual motors running,” Hayes writes.
6. The Principle of Rest may then seem like a paradox — but it is the final and in a sense the most foundational tenet of any sustained practice. Anyone who has suffered the aches and injuries of overtraining, anyone who has suffered the spiritual hollowing of burnout, knows the cost of not taking time to recover from exertion, to replenish the body’s energy and the soul’s store of creative vitality. “Just as the body needs time to rest,” writes Hayes, whose superb book The Anatomist demanded of him a three-year recovery, “so does an essay, story, chapter, poem, or especially, a book.”

Couple with Zadie Smith on what writers can learn from dancers, then revisit some excellent advice on writing (applicable to all creative work) from James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Octavia Butler, Rachel Carson, Rebecca Solnit, and Mary Oliver.

Few things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness. The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of — from the small luxuries of naps and watermelon to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love — are the stories that shape our lives. Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.

The more vulnerable-making the endeavor, the more reflexive the limitation and the more redemptive the liberation.

That difficult, delicate, triumphal pivot from self-limitation to self-liberation in the most vulnerable-making of human undertakings — love — is what poet and philosopher David Whyte, who thinks deeply about these questions of courage and love, maps out in his stunning poem “The Truelove,” found in his book The Sea in You: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love (public library) and read here by David himself in his sonorous Irish-tinted English voice, in his singular style of echoing lines to let them reverberate more richly:

THE TRUELOVE
by David Whyte

There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.

I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.

Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,

and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them

and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love

so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.

Couple this generous gift of a poem with “Sometimes” — David’s perspectival poem about living into the questions of our becoming — then revisit the Noble-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska on great love and James Baldwin, who believed that poets are “the only people who know the truth about us” — on love and the illusion of choice.

Uncommon Presents from the Past: Gifts for the Science-Lover and Nature-Ecstatic in Your Life, Benefitting the Nature Conservancy