musings

The singular and the strange

Yesterday I wrote about the ways in which the universe, in all of its grandiose, extravagant meaning, is often best glimpsed in the tiniest details.  And then, in one of those coincidences-that-aren’t, I read Amy Palko’s fabulous post about “all those tiny details that create an individual.”  I love the way we can glimpse, in the tiniest, most specific things, the whole of who she is.  And isn’t this the only way, actually, to see who someone else is?  The details of their lives – choices, actions, preferences – are the window through which we can glimpse their spirit.  It’s there that we see the hidden geode glittering.

Inspired by Amy’s post, I wanted to share some of the tiny things that exist in the enormous pile of details that make up me.  I would love to hear yours.

  • I can’t drive a stick shift car.  I wish I could, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t.  In a correlated detail, when I was learning to drive I almost pitched our old Jeep directly into the ocean.  Perhaps also correlated: my parents insist that their vehicles be manual, so I can’t drive either of their cars.
  • I’m born in the Chinese year of the Tiger and I’m a Leo.  Despite these associations, I don’t really like cats.
  • I was born 3 weeks early.  I’ve been in a hurry ever since.
  • One day as a child living in Paris, I woke up to snow and shouted, “Mummy!  Mummy!  Il neige!”  To this day I still call my mother and say that most days that it snows.
  • I have 3 pairs of neon running socks that I love and wear almost exclusively.
  • I drink my coffee with rice milk and agave in it.  I haven’t been to Starbucks since July and I don’t miss it one single bit.  I have usually made and set the coffeemaker for the next morning by 5pm the day before.
  • When we lived in London I had such a British accent that often people didn’t know I was American.
  • My son and my sister have the same middle name; he is named after her.
  • My father and my husband are both Geminis, second-born twins, and MIT graduates.
  • I have to have a fan blowing directly on me to sleep.  And a pitch-dark room.  Being a better sleeper is on the very short list of things I would change about myself if I could.
  • When I was 14, in London, I played a fairy on a short-lived TV series called East of the Moon.
  • I am a committed and unshakeable devotee of the Oxford comma.

 Please, please share some of the details – at once minute and essential – of yourself with me!

The universal and the infinite

“The more you respect and focus on the singular and the strange, the more you become aware of the universal and infinite.”
– Gail Godwin

I have known and loved this quote for a long time but I have never read anything by Godwin.  That’s about to change as Evensong is next in my stack.

I think Godwin’s words explain exactly what it is I’m looking for – and seeing – in the black branches against the saturated blue of a January sky, in the small knot of a brown bird’s nest, in the way a leaf stuck to the back of my car window looks like a heart, in the whorl of my son’s ear.  It’s the same thing I look for, and see, in the hearts of others.  It is in the tiniest, most specific moments – the way someone’s hands cup their baby, the kind words in an email, the look in a pair of eyes as they study mine – that I can glimpse the glittery chasm inside of another person.

Isn’t it, actually, in most infinitesimal details that the eternal resides?

Isn’t it the the smallest moments and most minute images that offer us a portal into the extravagant pageant of this life?

I think it’s partly because the universe, either within or without us, is too enormous and complex to be grasped in its entirety.  I keep having the image of not being able to back up enough to get the whole into a single frame.  So instead we turn to the tiniest flowers embroidered in an enormous tapestry, to the smallest manifestations of that gigantic, endless whole that animates our lives.

I take pictures of everything, and I walk around in wonder at the smallest things.  I think Godwin’s words say exactly why.  In those tiniest things I see the universe itself.

Holiness

We live in all we seek.  The hidden shows up in too-plain sight.  It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious.  What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.

I went back to my dogeared copy of Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being this week, I’m not sure why.  As I leafed through the familiar pages, these words jumped out at me.  During these days when we wake in darkness and we eat dinner in darkness, when the light is so full of both endings and beginnings, the sun bright yet weak, I am trying to see the holiness spread all over this life of mine.

Some days it jumps out and snaps foil in my eyes, waking me up. How can I miss the beauty in this sky, that was spread out above me on a recent walk with Grace?  If that’s not divinity, tangible in this human world of ours, I don’t know what is.

Or this sunset, seen from my desk.  The sky went deep pink, and I took pictures, and then returned to my computer.  And suddenly, for some reason I can’t recall (maybe I heard car doors slamming and the screeches of my children) I looked back out.  And the sky had caught fire.  If I hadn’t looked over, I would have entirely missed it, as the entire show lasted no more than 5 minutes.  It is impossible not to drop to my knees in reverence, not to feel the presence of something that exists beyond logic – over the horizon – in that sky.  And so I do.

Other days I have to be slightly more aware.  When I parked the car the other day, on my way to an interview on a cold early morning, I could not believe how loud the song of sparrows was.  I looked closely and saw that the bush right by the road, barren and brown, was absolutely full to bursting with sparrows.  I tried to take a picture but of course it didn’t quite capture what I saw.  In the midst of all these dead branches, this fallow world, there is song.

Light, and the vocabulary of mystery

I have been thinking about light.  Of course I have.  Even more than usual.  MK Countryman sent me a fascinating interview from NPR with Arthur Zajonc, an academic who “bring[s] together physical and poetic understandings.”  Zajonc is a physicist and also a committed meditator, and his practice of contemplation-enriched science really spoke to me (remember, I grew up in the space between science and poetry, and have a strong interest myself in both).

The interview is full of interesting topics.  Zajonc touches on Rudolf Steiner, Goethe, and Einstein.  I highly recommend reading it in full.  A couple of points resonated the most with me.

“But…if you don’t have an object for light to fall on, in fact, we only see darkness.”  Zajonc takes this image and uses it as a metaphor for all of contemplation.  He imagines light to me this kind of meditation, this thinking, this falling into the spirit of things.  Through careful use of this light, “one comes to know the inside of every outside. It’s not only human beings that have an interior or an inside, but that the world around us as well can be known inwardly.  So life is dense with those levels of experience, but we need to calm ourselves, get clear, get quiet, direct attention, sustain the attention, open up to what is normally invisible, and certain things begin to show themselves. Maybe gently to begin with, but nonetheless it deepens and enriches our lives. If we are committed to knowledge, then we ought to be committed also to exploring the world with these lenses, with this method in mind and heart.  You know, otherwise we’re kind of doing it halfway. And then when we go to solve the problems of our world, whether they’re educational or environmental, we’re bringing only half of our intelligence to bear; we’ve left the other half idle or relegated it to religious philosophers. But if we’re going to be integral ourselves, you know, have a perspective which is whole, then we need to bring all of our capacities to the issues that we confront, spiritual capacities as well as more conventional sensory-based intellects and the like.”

This passage is long, but the ideas it contains strike a gong deep inside of me, and remind me that the word light came to me, now, for a reason.  The internal light, brought to bear on our experience, can help us knit together the worlds of the intellect and the spirit.  And it is in this combination that the true meaning of our life here on earth is found.

Zajonc talks about another important duality: “colors come in to being through the interaction or the conflict or the meeting of light and darkness.”  This makes me think of my own musings on light and shadow, and of my belief that it is in the shadows that the most important and interesting insights are found.  Where light borders darkness, in the liminal corners of life.  These are the places I am drawn to, the places I find the most richness.

I think part of why I like the light this time of year, or in summer evenings, is that I can actually see the light.  As opposed to most of the time, when light – unless you look incredibly closely, and have a finely-tuned eye, which I’m not sure I do – is invisible, illuminating all that we see without getting involved.  This is why I love my photograph of the setting sun on the Church of the Nativity.  I love moments when light itself is a participant in my experience, because they remind me of the immense power of something that is often so invisible.  Invisible, and yet crucial, to our sight.

At the end of the interview, Tippett asks Zajonc about his “vocabulary of mystery.”  I adore this image, and wonder if it isn’t another, more poetic way to describe what I keep writing and searching for, so fumblingly, about here.

Invisible to mortal sight

I’ve mentioned my father before, the physicist–poet whose influence looms large over me (as does my mother’s).  Well, in a single gesture this week, Dad reminded me yet again of the craggy peaks of his intellect; he read my post about light and responded with an email in which he shared a passage from Paradise Lost.  A passage about light.  A passage I haven’t read in years, a passage that brought to mind long, drawn-out conversations about ancient poetry under magnolia trees at Princeton, a passage that reminded me that Dad has read and re-read Paradise Lost, the whole thing, on his own, more than once.  The guy who has a PhD in Engineering.

You get my point.

Anyway.  I wanted to acknowledge my super-cool Dad, for this generous gesture that tells you a lot about the terroir in which I grew up.  But I also wanted to share a few of Milton’s truly incandescent lines (a word Dad used in his email, one that is one of my very favorite words, reminding me yet again of the continued power of light in my life).  The lines I love best from the (longer) passage that Dad sent me are these:

So much the rather though, celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Of course celestial Light, and angels, and the power of faith, religion, and belief are all front of mind right now.  But these lines also remind me of some I recently re-encountered, when Grace read them for the first time.  She actually told me, that night, as I was tucking her in, that she’d read something she really liked.  And she’d thumbed her paperback carefully, found the page, and read me this sentence.  And I blinked back tears.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I’ve never been afraid to draw parallels between disparate sources (Dr. Seuss and Mark Doty, anyone?), but this one doesn’t actually feel that disparate.  And what these two passages remind me of is that light, as a concept, as a trope, as a way of understanding the world, functions both externally and internally.  As I continue to strive for lightness – humor and laughter – and to sink into the gorgeousness of the shadows and light and dark at play in the sky, I want to also remember the immense importance of that internal light.

I want to honor the spirit’s seeing, which happens by the beam of that internal light.