In her stunning space-bound ode to the human condition inspired by Carl Sagan, Maya Angelou wrote of us as cosmically lonesome creatures “traveling through casual space past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns” — and yet these selfsame stars made us; out all this indifference arose all our capacity for feeling, our poems and our postulates. That every single atom in your body, if tagged and traced back in time, would lead to the core of a particular star in the early universe is a truth pulsating with transcendence, a truth Nick Cave channels beautifully in one of my favorite songs, singing of the stars as “bright, triumphant metaphors of love.”

An epoch ago, before we set foot on the Moon and sent rovers to Mars, before we built supercolliders to search for the “God particle” and heard the sound of spacetime in a gravitational wave, the cosmically curious English marine biologist N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) took up the eternal question of how to harmonize our cosmic smallness with the immensity of our creaturely experience in his slender, splendid 1958 book You and the Universe (public library).

Pillars of Creation, Eagle Nebula, Messier 16. Infrared photograph. NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Berrill — a writer partway between Rachel Carson and Carl Sagan in both subject and poetic sensibility — begins with the basic question of being alive:

Just what are we doing here, spinning on a tilted planet swinging round a star? … Where do we stand, with our few pounds of flesh and bones and our fleeting lives?… Only a short while ago we were all God’s children, holding most of His attention, and the world was exclusively ours for better or for worse. The sun shone to give us warmth and light, the moon to bewitch us, the stars were there to be born under, and the volcanic depths to serve as hell. Now paradise is lost and we find ourselves in limbo, inhabiting one of the minor planets of a middle-class star drifting in the outer arm of a spiral galaxy no different from a hundred million more that are visible through our telescopes. Space and time and stellar systems are overwhelming and to face the twinkling sky of night with any sense of what you see requires either courage or a great amount of faith. Stars are no longer baleful or beneficial, an have no concern with us, but they leave a lonely terror striking at the heart. So here we stand, looking wistfully into the void and nostalgically back into time, for knowledge has put us outside our house.

And yet, in consonance with Richard Feynman’s poetic meditation on the relationship between knowledge and mystery, Berrill insists that greater intimacy with the raw reality of the universe, rather than further evicting, would reopen the door to our sense of belonging:

Perhaps in the end we can rediscover the reality of our home with a greater sense of wonder and a more mature appreciation.

He places at the heart of this possibility “the need to join outward observation with inner intuition.” In a passage that calls to mind the French paleontologist, Jesuit priest, and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s elegant case for bridging the scientific and the sacred, Berrill writes:

It is the aim of science to coordinate all observable phenomena within a single natural order and it is its faith that such is possible. Hence the basic objection to acceptance of the supernatural. If the scientific stand is justified, then everything, whether of matter, energy, mind or spirit, belongs to one vast scheme — it is all one and every part has meaning in relation to the whole. This is as much a tenet of faith as any other belief, but it forms the working hypothesis of all real scientific endeavor.

Rather than being in conflict with the miraculousness of life, our material nature is the miracle itself:

Put together in the proper way and we all turn out to be a rather weak watery solution of salts and carbon compounds, more or less jellified. You and I, with all that we eat and the various bacteria, fungi and viruses that live so happily within us, are a mingling of the wind and water and dust that constitute the surface of the earth. The miracle is that such stuff as we are made of should walk and talk and know such things as song and sadness.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

In consonance with Loren Eiseley’s poetic insistence that life itself is “is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness” — a miracle each of us repeats in our particular constitution of indifferent atoms forged in long-dead stars — Berrill writes:

Life… is not something set in motion long ago to get along as best it can ever since, whether by some sort of divine intervention or a peculiar concatenation of circumstances: it must be maintained and incessantly driven along its path of freedom, hour by hour and year by year throughout the ages, coerced into being from moment to moment and forced willy-nilly into the channels of time.

For us humans, he observes, “life is a dance of hydrogen and electrons along the atomic pathways of the body” — but life abounds and insists on itself, in every living form:

In every second of time the visible beings, large and not so large, vegetable and animal, are growing out of the invisible with a force so subtle yet so irresistible they can break a rock or split an atom. Out of almost nothing came the leviathans of trees and beasts, inexorably expanding to a destined size. Out of a almost nothing, almost but not quite — for there is the fact we tend to overlook or take for granted: the capacity of the smallest unit of living matter to grow into stupendous and bewilderingly complicated wholes. It goes on around us all the tim; it is the world we live in, and it is ourselves, you and I. We are the event itself, or at least a very significant part of it — giant examples of expansion, marvelously elaborated, and of exceptionally long duration.

Alluding to the strangely spiritual science of what happens when we die, Berrill adds:

Duration is hard to achieve, not that which belongs to crystals and rock but duration of the transcendent form and sparkle that belong to life. Hence the need for continual renewal, of birth from death, of the corn king who dies and the spring queen who brings forth life again. Life is forever being resurrected, not from nothing but from that speck of continuity that breaks off as a bud or seed or egg, leaving the old blown-up construction of the body lagging behind in time to stumble and die. Each fragment that begins anew, no matter what we call it, has time built into it.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse book

A century after Whitman wrote that “the whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly at a single individual, namely, you,” and a generation after quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made the koan-like quantum-infused observation 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,”, Berrill writes:

Nature, in the intimate and in the vast, is not designed. It is designing. Our own nature confirms it.

[…]

The merging qualities of hope, courage, love, intellectual quest and the sense of beauty, as represented to some degree in every human being, are emergent qualities of all that the universe is made of… Whether you wish to call this the path to God or to use some other term is not important, for the meaning if far older than any language and is both supernal and transcendent. At this level the spiritual and scientific ventures become one, and any experience derived from either source must be scrutinized in the light of the other. Above all we need not be afraid, either of the universe at large in all its oneness and multiplicity, or of our own nature which has itself been created by a star.

In soulful defiance of the materialist reductionism with which some apprehend the elemental nature of the universe, Berrill anticipates physicists Alan Lightman and Sean Carroll’s respective notions of “spiritual materialism” and “poetic naturalism,” and adds:

If mind and spirit grow out of matter they are nonetheless what they have been thought to be. It is our conception of matter that needs revision. All that is included in thought, perception and spiritual harmony belong as naturally in the universe as visible energy and tangible matter, and it is our peculiarly human task at the moment to see them all as facets of a whole.

[…]

The universe is as we find it and as we discover it within ourselves.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse book

With its fusion of frustration and hope, waiting is one of the most singularly maddening human experiences, and one of the great arts of living. To wait for something is to value it, to want it, to yearn for it, but to face its absence, its attainment forestalled by time and circumstance. All true waiting — which is different from abstinence, delayed gratification, and other forms of self-discipline — has an element of helplessness to it and is therefore training ground for mastering the vital, incredibly difficult balance of control and surrender that gives shape to our entire lives.

Because, as Tom Waits so unforgettably observed, the way we do anything is the way we do everything, our style of waiting is a miniature of our style of living: There is impatient and petulant waiting; there is waiting with the humility that while we may be worthy of the object of our hope, we are not entitled to it or to the mercies of time; there is waiting with an open heart and a willingness to be surprised, for the wait itself may reveal something we did not yet know about ourselves that might change our desire for the awaited outcome. (“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope,” T.S. Eliot wrote knowing this, “for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.”)

At its core, waiting is a frustrated relationship between desire and time — a surplus of desire with no temporal agency over its fulfillment. In that sense, it is the opposite of boredom — another singularly maddening experience, marked by total temporal agency hollowed of desire.

This is how I think of it:

But like boredom, waiting is also one of our earliest and most primal experiences — infancy and childhood are punctuated by the parent’s absences and it is in missing the parent, in awaiting their return, that we get our first taste of longing, of frustration, of rage. In missing the mother, the infant is training for all the people they will ever love and miss in the course of life. Every absence is therefore a fractal of that great primal absence, and while hardly anyone can wait with a penguin’s patience and faith, those with insecure attachment — most often the product of a childhood marked by a parent’s irremediable absences, physical or emotional — find waiting especially tortuous.

In On Getting Better (public library) — one of his many small, tremendous books about the paradoxes composing our lives — the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that we can get better at waiting, better at putting absences in the service of our emotional and spiritual development.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

To get better at waiting and at withstanding absences, Phillips argues, is “to get better at, to begin with, missing the mother, and then missing all the people one loves and needs.” Drawing on the influential work of Donald Winnicott, he writes:

The child experiences the mother’s absence as a withholding of something that could be given. The mother forbears to come into presence, and the child can’t help but react, respond, mobilize something in or of himself to manage the withdrawal in the first instance, often rage. Everything depends in this developmental story on how mother and child deal with the absences. It is in one sense a matter of time, of how long the wait is before the mother reappears. “It is a matter,” Winnicott writes in Playing and Reality, “of days, or hours, or minutes. Before the limit is reached the mother is still alive; after this limit has been overstepped the mother is dead.” That is to say it feels to the child that the mother he has in his mind has died; and/or he has killed her in his mind out of rage at her absence. In this story it is all about what happens in the absence — what Winnicott calls the “gap” — and, more pragmatically, what can be done in, or with, the gap.

It is in that gap that we cultivate the most essential skill for enduring absence and the tyranny of waiting — “the capacity to bear frustration without turning against one’s needy self, or against the person one needs.” Phillips writes:

When you are waiting for someone you are looking forward to seeing, can you do anything other than wait? And can you enjoy them when they finally arrive? How you wait is who you are, and everything depends on your sense of an ending.

At its healthiest, Phillips intimates, that sense ought to be one of open-endedness — Winnicott himself considered the mark of a healthy person the ability to have, as Phillips puts it, “a certain kind of mutual relationship with another person, but to no obviously discernible, or predictable, end.” And indeed the sense that we are unfinished — as individuals and as a species, in our personal development and our interpersonal relations and our evolutionary trajectory — may be the single most hopeful thing about being alive, the truest grounds for faith.

Complement this fragment of On Getting Better — a superb read in its entirety, and a mighty antidote to the fashionable cult of self-improvement — with Phillips on knowing what you want and the courage to change your mind, then revisit Winnicott on the qualities of a healthy mind and a healthy relationship.

We are lucky accidents of chemistry and chance, children of choices made for us by the impartial forces that set the first atoms into motion and by the human partialities that have shaped this latest blink of cosmic time we call history. The astonishing thing is that not one human being who ever lived has chosen the body, brain, place, or time to be born into, and yet in the narrow band of freedom between these chance parameters, we must find a way to live lives of substance and sweetness. Chance deals the hand and we must play it, and in how we choose to play it lies the measure of who we are.

Poet Aracelis Girmay and artist Diana Ejaita take up these immense, intimate questions with uncommon soulfulness in Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way (public library) — a magical-realist story, lyrical and consummately illustrated, about a little boy and his grandmother who wake up one morning to find themselves on the Moon, pressed to make a home amid its inhospitable strangeness. What emerges is an ode to the stubborn courage of choosing to make a lush life out of even the most arid circumstances, to the defiant will of prevailing over the odds with fearless grace.

The Moon has always been our nearest notion of another world and other worlds have always been one of our most imaginative ways of thinking about our own, about otherness itself. Five millennia after Johannes Kepler pioneered science fiction by challenging humanity’s unexamined assumptions with an allegory about life on the Moon, here is an allegory that touches with great tenderness the global consequence of one of humanity’s most inhumane choices. But although the book celebrates the African diaspora — an undeniably singular experience — it has universal resonance for the broader experience of finding oneself transplanted, by choice or by circumstance, to a world so profoundly other that it appears alien, that one feels alien in it. (That is what America felt like when I arrived alone from Bulgaria in my late teens — incidentally, having been raised there largely by a grandmother named Zizi.)

ZuZu, discomposed at first by how different the lunar landscape feels from their home village, sets out to grow the most vital nourishments for body and soul. “Hello there, Sister,” she says to the ground as she presses a kernel of corn into it, then a clothespin from her apron, then a photograph of her mother, then a square of cloth tucked inside her favorite book.

In time, all kinds of things begin to grow. (“Wherever life can grow, it will. It will sprout out, and do the best it can,” Gwendolyn Brooks wrote in her poignant tribute to anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.)

From the kernel grew moon corn, but also moon beans

From the clothespin grew trees — mango, cashew, and willow.

And from the square of cloth, a wide and silent kite. And also a flock of birds and a very small meadow of flowers.

The tears ZuZu cries missing her family — the psychology of missing being one of the hardest and most defining aspects of human experience — stream down her face and into the ground to become a deep well of drinking water.

And so the boy grows, and learns to plant, and learns to sing, watching his grandmother dance. (“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his timeless memoir of surviving the Holocaust.)

Meanwhile on Earth — in that beloved “Back Home” place — ZuZu and Kamau’s family search for them near and far “for days, then weeks, then years.”

And then one day, by the same unexplained miracle that had landed the boy on that alien world, a letter appears in his father’s pocket to let him know that Kamau is safe with ZuZu on the Moon.

Word spreads across the village, exuberant with relief: “They’re all right! They have sent word!”

But then comes the question of how to write back.

Everyone shrugs, stumped, until Kamau’s sister comes up with an idea partway between science and magic — she heads to the ocean on her bicycle to harness the eternal relationship between the Moon and the tides (which Kepler uncovered), writing her letter in the sand for the water to carry it to her little brother.

And soon, the whole village is sending oceanic letters to the Moon. (“Each that we lose takes part of us,” Emily Dickinson wrote. “A crescent still abides, / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides.”)

So begins the correspondence between Back Home and the Moon. “These letters did not make the distance any less great,” Girmay writes, “but they had found a way to know each other.”

ZuZu finds a way to help Kamau know the Back Home world, too.

They would often sit and look out into the big, bright blue of Back Home, and he would ask his questions, and she would tell him everything she could. The noises, the fruits, the camels, the sea.

At the heart of the story is a reckoning with the meaning of resilience, of strength, of that bright stubbornness by which we make our lives emblems of the possible amid the improbable.

Looking at their new home on the Moon “outside the realm of what anyone thought could be,” knowing it is not what she would have chosen for her grandson, ZuZu captures the essence of the human spirit:

But we will have to find a way to live, as people do.

Something about the way she said “live” always filled Kamau’s blood up with sun.

Kamau & ZuZu Find a Way, which comes from the always inspired and inspiring Enchanted Lion, is lifeblood for the soul from cover to cover. Couple it with I Touched the Sun — a tender illustrated fable about how to find and bear your inner light, also from Enchanted Lion — then savor a very different existential meditation lensed through our closest cosmic companion in Dorianne Laux’s stunning poem “Facts about the Moon.”

A NEW RECORD I LOVE

A little bit of portable transcendence and a mighty antidote to the epidemic of cynicism savaging this tender world.

AN INTERVIEW I ENJOYED

It was a joy to converse with the thoughtful and largehearted Dan Harris about our search for meaning, the courage of uncertainty in an age of self-righteousness, the liberations and limitations of habit, why the hardest thing in life is not getting what you want but knowing what you want, and how to live wonder-smitten by reality. Listen here.

A BOOK I MADE

Peek inside here.