How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe,” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.

That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada (public library) — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.”

One of Japanese artist Chiura Obata’s 1930s paintings of Yosemite

Nevle — who was first enchanted by the distant contour of the mountains when he was five but did not see them fully until he began his doctoral studies in geology eighteen years later — writes:

Many claim to have found God in the mountains. I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too. Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry — its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation. For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark, to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction of a previously unencountered wildflower — to wonder and to seek answers to how these things might have come to be in the world — are themselves acts of devotion, ways of knowing, ways of longing for communion.

Nightingale harmonizes:

Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and everything we are.

It is no accident that Virginia Woolf arrived at her epiphany about the unity of being while looking at a flower, that Oliver Sacks grasped deep time while walking in a forest, that Mary Oliver contacted the interconnectedness of life while observing an owl: It is beauty that beckons our attention, and it is attention that lets us see the world whole. Nightingale considers the common root of these experiences, these revelations of wholeness:

In most cultures, in every century, beauty is bound up with unity. Beauty illuminates the affinity, the inner relation, the resemblance, the kinship, the concord and identity of things. We are all trained to tell things apart. In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike; to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport; a longed — for, conscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.

[…]

There is nothing more powerful than the movement toward beauty. As we walked, this thought sustained us. What we needed was to keep moving: one more day, and in each day, all day, one more step. It struck me as the simplest rule of life and of reflection: keep moving. Stay in readiness. Cultivate openness, clarity, affection, an easygoing revelry of the senses, a trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. Movement along a trail is movement within the mind. In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.

Beauty matters because it swings open the doors of perception, and it is by seeing — by taking in what is there, incorporating it into our inner world — that we can begin to comprehend and connect, out of which the sense of belonging arises. Nightingale reflects:

This is true for everyone, wherever we are: what we see is the preface to what we can see. Beyond that preface, with work and love, is what we can come to understand. If we can understand, then we can live. In the Sierra, we understood that we might, after all, belong here with tree and rock and time and light. We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.

One of Wilson Bentley’s “miracles of beauty”

Observing the delicate fragility of a single ice crystal, and thinking about Wilson Bentley’s snowflakes, he adds:

The world around us is not what we see. It holds a life-giving, gift-giving, invisible order everywhere and always. It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. Everywhere we look, if we would look, the natural world is making beauty, without fanfare, and the work is so plain, intelligent, playful, and devoted, that there is only one word for it: cosmic.

Throughout their journey, what kindles this sense of the cosmic are encounters with the earthly, in all its glorious smallness and specificity — a mountain chickadee hardly larger than a grape, singing in its “husky, harsh-sweet voice”; clouds “tangerine then crimson then lavender then gray”; a nutcracker harvesting ninety thousand whitebark seeds in a single year with its bill “black as obsidian”; a yellow-legged frog “as small as a baby’s hand, as still as a Buddha”; an aspen with its aria of color sung by chloroplasts that outnumber the stars in the Milky Way one hundredfold; a prairie falcon slicing through the clear blue with its speckled body, evoking a rush of astonishment that “such a wholly perfect thing could exist.” Nevle writes:

There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, a way in which the boundary between the world we sense and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, for the briefest of moments, thin — almost transparent.

Punctuating the poems and essays are diary entries raw with aliveness. On the second day of the expedition, Nevle records:

Up too early again. Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness. Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. I can’t believe we are here, surrounded by these old trees and mountains, with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, incredulous that this place actually exists, and I am here in it. I want to get up and wander down to the creek and feel its black, wet, cold aliveness on my skin.

Another of Chiura Obata’s Yosemite paintings

That exhilaration emanates from a sudden and vivid sense of the interconnectedness of life in the mountain, the interbelonging of the wanderer and every wild creature, every rocky crevasse:

The great spine of rock holds diverse forests, dreamy meadows, skeins of streams, radiant lakes, and rare glaciers. Life ascends even to the highest reaches of the range, thousands of feet above tree line, where gardens of black, orange, and chartreuse lichen adorn the rock. Everywhere a tenacious living skin sheaths the ancient bones of the mountains.

[…]

The gray-crowned rosy-finch, the bighorn sheep, the pika, and the skypilot with its violet-cobalt blooms make their home among the enchanted stone that air and dust and time and life made possible.

Art by Matthew Forsythe from The Gold Leaf

Moving through the mountain, Nightingale embraces the poet’s task of wresting metaphor from observation. In a reflection that calls to mind poet Natalie Diaz’s magnificent meditation on brokenness as a portal to belonging, he writes:

The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason: they have been broken so often… It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving and breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty — iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant — throughout the whole of the range.

But it is often the geologist who best channels the poetic dimension of the living world. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson gasped in a poem that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Nevle writes:

What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away? Consider the genus of flowering plants known as Castilleja, the paintbrushes. Species of Castilleja occur throughout the Sierra, from the oak savannas of the lowland foothills to the fragrant conifer forests of the mid-elevations to the sky gardens of the alpine fellfields — almost to the very crest of the range — blossoming in flames of vermillion and violet and cream and silvery mauve. Valley Tassels, Owl’s-Clover, Wooly Indian Paintbrush, Great Red Indian Paintbrush, Hairy Indian Paintbrush, Subalpine Paintbrush, Alpine Paint-brush, to name just a few of more than a dozen species of Castilleja whose blossoms return each year to the mountains. The sheer variety of Castilleja species you might encounter in a single summer day of wandering the Sierra might be enough to make you weep with gratitude for all the world offers us.

In the epilogue, Nightingale reflects on this countercultural endeavor to reunite dimensions of being that naturally belong together, that illuminate and magnify each other, despite how much our siloed and segregationist culture tries to keep them apart. (That, of course, is the animating spirit of The Universe in Verse.) He writes:

Science is thought by some to be dry, technical, and quantitative. It is not. Study is exaltation. Fact is miracle. Number is portal. Understanding is joy.

Poetry and spirituality are thought by some to be abstract, ethereal, private. They are not. Nature is language. Mind is sensual. Soul is earth.

Complement The Paradise Notebooks, an exultation of a read in its entirety, with The Living Mountain — poet Nan Shepherd’s timeless love letter to life lensed through the Scottish Highlands — and poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan’s poignant meditation on time and transcendence lensed through Mount Tamalpais, then revisit Emerson on nature and transcendence and Steinbeck (in his little-known nonfiction I find even more excellent than his novels) on wonder and the relational nature of the universe.

“Hearing the rising tide,” Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, “there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before… of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past to unknown future.” There is indeed in the physics of the tides — that gravitational dialogue between our planet and its only satellite — something of the existential, something reminding us how transient all things are, how fluid the future, how slippery our grasp of anything we hold on to, how relational every loss.

The tides bridge the earthly and the cosmic, science and symbol: They cause drag that slows down our planet’s spin rate; because gravity binds the two, as the Earth loses angular momentum, the Moon overcompensates in response; as it speeds up, it begins slipping out of our gravitational grip, slowly moving away from us. The prolific English astronomer Edmund Halley first began suspecting this haunting fact in the early 18th century after analyzing ancient eclipse records. It took another quarter millennium and a giant leap into the cosmos for his theory to be tested against reality in a living poem of geometry and light: When Apollo astronauts placed mirrors on the surface of the Moon and laser beams were aimed at them from Earth, it was revealed that the Moon is indeed drifting away from us, at the precise rate of 3.8 centimeters per year. The Moon, born of the body of the Earth billions of years ago, is drifting away at more than half the rate at which a child grows.

If even the Moon is leaving us — “that best fact, the Moon,” in Margaret Fuller’s exultant words — what is there to hold on to? How are we to bear our ordinary human losses, the worst facts of our lives?

Those questions, immense and intimate, come alive in the stunning title poem of Dorianne Laux’s’ collection Facts About the Moon (public library), stunningly performed by Debbie Millman at the seventh annual Universe in Verse on the eve of the 2024 total solar eclipse.

FACTS ABOUT THE MOON
by Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only child, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

Complement with a poetic meditation on moonlight and the magic of the unnecessary, Japanese artist Hasui Kawase’s beguiling woodcut moonscapes, the story of the first surviving photograph of the Moon, and Patti Smith’s haunting reading of Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” then revisit Dorianne Laux’s love letter to trees.

Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises — the difficulty of discerning comfort from entrapment, freedom from peril. It is a paradox rooted in the early development of the psyche and most poignantly manifested in our intimate relationships as we confront over and over the boundary between where we end and the other begins, the challenge of balancing intimacy and independence.

Pulsating beneath the paradox are two opposing forces — one tugging us toward the comfort of the known, the safety of the terminal, the other beckoning us to fly into the open sky of the unknown, with all its sunlit freedoms and its storming dangers. In her 1976 book Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life (public library), Gail Sheehy (November 27, 1936–August 24, 2020) explores these “two sets of forces always at loggerheads inside us over the questions of how far and how fast we shall grow,” terming them the Merger Self and the Seeker Self.

Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy

She writes:

Our Merger Self… is the universal wish to be attached to another, to restore somehow the beatific closeness with mother, for in that fusion would lie perfect harmony, absolute safety, and endless time. The Merger Self is born of the frustration with our early discovery that we are indeed separate and distinct from our caregiver. It triggers a desire to totally incorporate the other, any “other” who becomes the source of love and pleasure… The Merger Self then, in its constant effort to restore closeness, desires always a safe, tight fit.

The Seeker Self is driven by the opposite wish: to be separate, independent, to explore our capacities and become master of our own destiny. This impulse is fueled in early childhood by our delight in awakening capabilities.

But for all its problematic clinginess, the Merger Self is also crucial for the “temporary fusions” upon which empathy is founded — the ability “to reach out and empathize with others, to feel as they might feel without letting our own reality intrude” — and upon which all love rests; for all its seeming strength and self-reliance, the Seeker Self can thrust us into selfishness and solipsism. Only by balancing the two can we achieve what Carl Jung called individuation, Abraham Maslow called self-actualization, and Sheehy calls simply authenticity — “the arrival at that felicitous state of inner expansion in which we know of all our potentialities and possess the ego strength to direct their full reach.” She considers the necessary calibration at the heart of the balance:

If the Merger Self is indulged too early, it can lead us into a no-risk, no-growth position. But once we are beyond the suspicion, or the fear, of letting our distinctiveness be lost in attachments to others, it is our merger side that enables us to love intimately, share unselfishly, express tenderness, and experience empathy.

If the Seeker Self is left unbridled, it will lead us to a self-centered existence in which genuine commitments can have no place, and in which efforts to achieve individual distinction are so strenuous that they leave us emotionally impoverished.

It is only by getting the two sides to work in concert that eventually one becomes capable of both individuality and mutuality.

Art from An ABZ of Love

In the remainder of Passages (which I discovered through a sidewise mention in The Middle Passage), Sheehy goes on to explore how the balance of these two aspects of the psyche affects everything from romantic relationships to professional actualization across the various stages of life as we dismantle our projections and complexes, relinquish our compulsions and conditioning, and recover our authenticity. Observing that “the major task of midlife is to give up all our imagined safety providers and stand naked in the world, as the rehearsal for assuming full authority over ourselves,” she considers the ultimate payoff of this painful, redemptive process:

One of the great rewards of moving through the disassembling period to renewal is coming to approve of oneself ethically and morally and quite independent of other people’s standards and agenda. By giving up the wish that one’s parents were different and by navigating through various lifestyles to that point of dignity worth defending, one can achieve… arrival at that final stage of adult development, in which one can give a blessing to one’s own life.

Complement with Kahlil Gibran on the challenge of balancing intimacy and independence, the key to which Schopenhauer so poignantly captured in his parable of the porcupine dilemma, then revisit Rilke on the difficult art of giving space in love.

WHAT BIRDS DREAM ABOUT (AND HOW IT ILLUMINATES THE ROLE OF DREAMS IN OUR HUMAN LIVES)

I wrote a little something for The New York Times. Read it here.