Perched near the untimely end of a life strewn with losses, contemplating what remains when a loved one vanishes into “the drift called the infinite,” Emily Dickinson wrote:

Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.

I too have waded through the tide pool with its lapping waves of grief. It is impossible to get through a life — through half a life, even — without living through the two most universal human experiences: love and loss, each presupposing the other, each haunted either by the specter of the other or by its ever-present prospect. To love is to live always with the possibility of loss; to sorrow with loss is to have loved.

“Broken/hearted” by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)

That is what Abraham Lincoln sensed when he told a friend’s bereaved daughter that loss eventually resolves into “a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer and holier sort than you have known before.” That is what Elizabeth Gilbert articulated a century and a half later in her exquisite meditation on how to move through grief as grief moves through you, drawing on her own experience to observe:

Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted… Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.

That, too, is what Nick Cave — another lush mind rooted in a large and luminous spirit, another artist of uncommon originality — explores with tremendous sensitivity of insight in answering a young woman’s lyrical question about how to live with the disorientation of grief’s lapping waves, how to parse the almost-thereness with which a loved one gone haunts our days, consecrates the aliveness in all things — trees, birds, wind, night — with the thereness, breaks our heart over and over with the almostness.

“Liminal Worlds” by Maria Popova. Available as a print.

Cave writes:

The paradoxical effect of losing a loved one is that their sudden absence can become a feverish comment on that which remains. That which remains rises in time from the dark with a burning physicality — a luminous super-presence — as we acquaint ourselves with this new and different world. In loss things — both animate and inanimate — take on an added intensity and meaning.

In a sentiment evocative of Pico Iyer’s soulful meditation on the autumn light as a portal to finding beauty and impermanence and luminosity in loss, Cave adds:

This feeling… of alertness to the inner-spirit of things — this humming — comes from a hard-earned understanding of the impermanence of things and, indeed, our own impermanence. This lesson ultimately animates and illuminates our lives. We become witnesses to the thrilling emergency of the present — a series of exquisite and burning moments, each extinguished as the next arises. These magical moments are the bright jewels of loss to which we cling.

At the heart of the young woman’s question is the central paradox of loss: how in grief we can still be profoundly, transcendently moved by beauty — by a symphony or a sunflower or the song of the hermit thrush — and yet a slender screen of unreality slips between us and these motive forces, us and everything. “It’s strange to feel so connected and yet have a feeling of being so disconnected,” she writes. Cave addresses this paradox not as a disconnect but as the very wellspring of our connection to life:

There is, of course, another side where we lose our resolve — we drop our guard, or just grow tired and descend into that other, darker, less-lovely world, as we disconnect and retreat deep into ourselves… These revolving feelings of connection and disconnection… are the opposing forces of loss that define our lived experience… Many of us inhabit this uncanny realm of loss — and all of us will find our way there in time.

Art from Cry, Heart, But Never Break — a stunning Danish illustrated meditation on love and loss.

Complement with Hannah Arendt on love and how to live with the fundamental fear of loss, Seneca on the key to resilience through grief, and a soulful animated short film about loss and the unbreakable bonds of love, then revisit Cave on music, feeling, and transcendence in the age of artificial intelligence and do subscribe to his spare and excellent newsletter.

A century after the self-taught German naturalist and artist Maria Merian laid the foundations of modern entomology with her stunning pictorial studies of butterflies in Surinam and a century before Vladimir Nabokov applied his glorious intellectual promiscuity to advancing the field, the Australian sisters Harriet and Helena Scott unleashed their immense talent and curiosity on the natural history of butterflies and moths. A century after their death, their stunning, scrumptious paintings would furnish one of the most heartening conservation triumphs in history.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print and as a face mask. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Daughters of the Bombay-born Australian entomologist Alexander Walker Scott, Helena and Harriet were barely out of childhood when they started harmonizing their father’s scientific studies with their shared artistic gift. When the girls were in their teens, the family moved from Sydney to Ash Island — an isolated patch of native wilderness in the middle of Hunter River — where they filled their days and their minds with activities reserved for the era’s boys. The sisters spent twenty years adventuring into nature — probably wearing pants, certainly climbing trees — and documenting their astonishment, their awed curiosity, in field notebooks and collecting boxes and elaborate paintings. They lived on the timescale of the insects they studied, staying up at night to observe and illustrate in real time the metamorphoses unfolding in the span of hour, minutes, in creatures with life-cycles of days — transformations so subtle that the sisters often used the single hair of a paintbrush to render the delicate details.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print and as a face mask. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Detail from Helena and Harriet Scott’s art for Australian Lepidoptera.

A generation before Ernst Haeckel coined the term ecology and a century before Rachel Carson made it a household word, the Scott sisters spent innumerable hours in the wilderness, studying the plants that sustained the insects, seeking to understand and document the intricate relationships of life. At a time when most natural history illustration depicted animals in black and white, islanded on the page as specimens extracted from their natural context and splayed for the human viewer’s eye, they chose to honor the vibrant living creatures within the web of life.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print and as a face mask. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Paper, imported from England, was so precious that they used each sheet twice — painting on the front, writing on the back, in a tiny script that could compress the maximum amount of information, the greatest volume of coded curiosity, into the finite physical space. They organized and catalogued their father’s specimens, watched the glasswing, Acraea andromacha, lay her innumerable eggs inside the passionflower, watched the caterpillar turn pupa turn butterfly, and rendered what they saw in consummate detail.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott. (Australian Museum archives)

In an era when scientific illustrators were often uncredited in the works they illustrated, an era when hardly any women were published authors and of the few who were, most published under initials or male pseudonyms, Alexander Walker Scott made the bold and loving decision to print his daughters’ names in the book’s title itself, honoring them as collaborators. After a thirteen-year delay due to its exceedingly costly production bent on preserving the vibrancy and integrity of the original art, the two-volume Australian Lepidoptera and their transformations, drawn from the life by Harriet and Helena Scott was published in 1864.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print and as a face mask. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Although they could only afford to print a fraction of the 100 artworks Harriet and Helena, now in their early thirties, had painted as teenagers between 1846 and 1851, the book just about bankrupted the Scotts without garnering the recognition they had hoped for. Soon after its publication, their mother died of a heart attack — a devastation to the young women who shared a close bond with her and whose grief was compounded by the sudden loss of the freedom their mother’s domestic care had afforded them to pursue their artistic-scientific career. The family was forced to sell Ash Island and move into humbler dwellings back in Sydney. Harriet wrote to a friend at the Australian Museum of natural history:

In a week or so we shall leave this place poorer than we ever were in our lives, and I am and shall be until poor Papa gets something to do, working to gain a livelihood for us three. We give up every article that belongs to us and if I can take my drawing materials I shall think myself fortunate. With these I hope to be able to make enough to live in a very small way for a time.

Helena and Harriet Scott

Shortly after the migration, Harriet and Helena were thrust into even deeper dispossession and grief — their father died. Forced to lean on their talent not along their passions but against their survival, they began taking commissions decorating wedding photographs with drawings of wildlife and plants, they painted commercial dinner plate sets, they made botanical illustrations for railway guides, they illustrated the first holiday cards featuring native Australian wildflowers. Scholars consider them Australia’s first paid female artists.

Even so, the income was not enough for the sisters to subsist on. They made the difficult decision to sell their life’s work to the Australian Museum, of which their father had been a trustee. The museum, where the scrumptious Scott collection now lives among the country-continent’s largest and oldest natural history and rare books archive, bought it for £200, or around £25,000 today.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

For a century, the Scott sisters’ work lay brown-papered in the underbelly of the museum, until curator Marion Ord rediscovered it with a gasp of awe and set about bringing it back to life in a book celebrating the museum’s bicentenary — a book on which conservationists began leaning to restore and rewild Ash Island, which industrial farming had left razed of trees and bereft of insects in the twentieth century.

A turning point for the conservation effort was the discovery of a crucial document among the Scott sisters’ papers: Helena’s full list of the plants growing on Ash Island in 1862 — a function of the sisters’ understanding of ecology before the term existed. More than 240 species, ranging from trees to ferns to fungi, were each meticulously catalogued as a complete phylogenetic listing.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

A century after Harriet and Helena Scott returned their borrowed atoms to the web of life, more than 250,000 native trees have been replanted on their beloved Ash Island with the help of hundreds of volunteers, restoring the flood-plane rainforest of their childhood. Ash Island is now a national park.

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Art by Helena and Harriet Scott from Australian Lepidoptera, 1864. Available as a print. (A portion of proceeds benefits The Nature Conservancy.)

Australian Museum curator, historian, and archivist Vanessa Finney tells the Scott sisters’ previously untold story in the consummately illustrated Transformations (public library). Complement it with Peter Rabbit creator Beatrix Potter’s groundbreaking studies and illustrations of mushrooms, which mycologists still use to identify species, trailblazing 18th-century artist Sarah Stone’s natural history paintings of exotic, endangered, and extinct species, some of them native to Australia, and the remarkable story of her young contemporary Elizabeth Blackwell, who taught herself botanical illustration and created the world’s first illustrated encyclopedia of medicinal plants to save her husband from debtor’s prison.

In one of her love letters, Margaret Fuller — who laid the foundation of American feminism, advocated for black voting rights generations before women won the vote, and believed in every fiber of her being that genius is “common as light” when given the chance — wrote of “that best fact, the Moon.” A century, a Civil War, and two World Wars after her, amid the golden age of space exploration, the great Italian scientist, humanist, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi considered the spiritual value of our cosmic dreams in his gorgeous essay “The Moon and Man,” insisting that “for good or evil, we are a single people: the more we become conscious of this, the less difficult and long will be humanity’s progress toward justice and peace.”

Marilyn Nelson shines a sidewise gleam on that best, most unifying fact in her stunning poem “The Children’ Moon,” written in the voice of her own mother — one of the first black women to teach at an all-white elementary school, spearheading a classroom of twenty white second-graders at an Air Force base school in Kansas four months after Brown v. Board of Education.

Performed at the On Being gathering in 2018 and published a year earlier in Mrs. Nelson’s Class (public library) — the conceptually brilliant anthology Nelson edited, featuring persona poems by twenty different poets, each taking on the voice of one of the bodies in her mother’s classroom to imagine what the experience of making history together might have been like — the poem is a stunning reminder that the human capacity for wonder at the grandeur of the universe and the natural world, a capacity “common as light” among us all, will always eclipse the capacity for diminishment and divisiveness along artificial lines, lines drawn not by the reality of nature but by the selectively consensual non-reality we call culture, lines that constrict and confine and desecrate what is best and largest in our nature.

THE CHILDREN’S MOON
by Marilyn Nelson

In my navy shirtwaist dress and three-inch heels,
my pearl clip-ons and newly red-rinsed curls,
I smoothed on lipstick, lipstick-marked my girls,
saluted and held thumbs-up to my darling Mel,
and drove myself to school for the first day.

Over the schoolyard a silver lozenge
dissolved into the morning’s blue cauldron.
Enter twenty seven-year-old white children.
Look, children, I said as they found their desks:
The children’s moon! A special good luck sign!

We pledged allegiance, and silently prayed.
George Washington watched sternly from his frame.
I turned to the blackboard and wrote my name.
I thought I heard, She’s the REAL teacher’s maid!
I thought I heard echoes of history.

But when I turned, every child in the room
had one hand up, asking, What is the children’s moon?

Complement with Nelson’s entrancing performance of her existential-scientific poem “Faster than Light” at the third annual Universe in Verse and savor her On Being conversation with Krista Tippett (who also read an existential-mathematical poem in the same show), then revisit other titanic poets of our time performing their own work: Marie Howe reading “Singularity,” Ross Gay reading “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” Elizabeth Alexander reading “The Venus Hottentot,” U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading from “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” and Jane Hirshfield reading “Today, Another Universe.”