Amid the chaos and prosperity of the early thirteenth century, a young man wanders the road between Rome and Assisi. He’s a rich kid, but he’s also seen war and prison; and now he struggles with images of brokenness and suffering he can’t shake. In a ruined chapel, the icon of the Christ Crucified speaks to him: rebuild my church. He starts right where he is, selling his horse and clothes to pay forthe chapel’s repair. This rebuilding wouldn’t end there; in a real sense, this rebuilding continues. For Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone—or Francesco, Francis, as his family knew him—the encounter begins in epiphany, but work is where the vision unfurls.

I thought about Francis as I walked the roads around New Harmony, Indiana, where I made a stop in early July. I’d driven out west to spend the month helping with my mother’s care and condition. She’s in the critical-care wing of her assisted-living home, on a hall reserved for short-term rehabilitative stays. It’s clear that she’ll never leave. She can’t get up from her chair, can’t read or use her phone, and needs help for the most basic bodily needs. The here-and-now is mixed for her with the stream-for-free reruns she watches day and night, The Waltons and Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Their mix of hardscrabble redemption and chaparral gothic permeates her reality: she tells us about a mountain man who hides in the closet sometimes; she rails about how Michael Landon treats his children and gets anxious about the Second Coming.

Before going into all of that, I wanted a dose of utopia. Thus the stop in New Harmony, the site of not one but two utopian communities in the nineteenth century: first, the Harmonists, a Pietist sect from Germany, and then the Owenites, named after Welsh industrialist and social reformer Robert Owen, who bought the town from the Harmonists when they were ready to move on from their labyrinths and their great church. In the twentieth century the town became a site for spiritual encounter, largely through the efforts of visionary philanthropist Jane Blaffer, who commissioned Philip Johnson to build a roofless church inspired by Paul Tillich’s vision of architecture framing “holy emptiness” through austerity and abstraction. The Roofless Church is not empty, however. It feels less church than courtyard, a brick-lined temenos enclosing a spare greensward with a baptismal fountain and memorial grove and a great, shaggy-shingled baldacchino sheltering Jacques Lipchitz’s statue, Descent of the Holy Spirit. But emptiness is what it strives for; emptiness is its ambition.

I found myself drawn more magnetically to New Harmony’s other chapel, designed by the sculptor Stephen De Staebler, whose perforate, starveling figures of the Ascension and the Annunciation stand in the perimeter of the Roofless Church. Down a dirt track along the edge of a little lake, his Chapel of the Little Portion perches plump and white like a crustless loaf of bread. It’s visible in the picture at the top, over the water beyond the figure of the exultant Francis and his flocks. Its name and size evoke the church Saint Francis rebuilt, known as the Portiuncula or Little Portion, as its diminutive close had been apportioned to the Benedictine order in earlier times. It’s where Francis would build his own order, and where he would return to die.

Across Pennsylvania and Ohio, I’d been listening to the audio edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, its Sonoran mirages filtering through the hazy outcroppings of the Waffle-House and Love’s-Truck-Stop signs along the interstates. There’s a ruined church in that book, too, and its main character, Billy Parham, isn’t much younger than the war-weary, pre-visionary Saint Francis.

Sitting at a rest-stop picnic bench under the drone of cicadas, I googled up and read a PDF suggesting that McCarthy‘s novel breathes the “Christian logic of anthropocentrism and dominion.” Maybe so. But the novel also knows that such dominion is ironic and transcendent in its originary formulation, an immanent sovereignty, a little portion given over to us all. And the character Billy Parham is no mere floating signifier to outline an ideology. When in pity and defeat he kills a wolf he has challenged himself to champion, for whose sake he has forsaken family and home, it is no resolution, but the act of a flawed, fallen creature, trapped in his own horizons, who nonetheless can sense the fragrance of redemption.

And later, after he has buried the wolf under rocks and wandered down from the mountain, in a ruined church in a border town, Billy listens to a man who once was a priest tell the story of the ruined church’s previous resident, who sheltered under the forsaken dome and strove to comprehend a God without limits. The man who was a priest tells Billy never to hope for such understanding, never to grasp for Presence or Purpose. But Billy already has encountered such Presence, has found it both numinous and incarnate: in the dying light of the wolf’s eyes, in her matted fur, in her bloodied, broken leg. In her unpossessible soul and her wild wont of life. That Billy knew but could not name his desire for this Presence somehow does not subtract from the sacramental charge of the encounter, nor does his lack of discernment lessen the feral magnificence of his response. For when Billy buries the wolf in a high pass of the mountains, we get a glimpse of the holy, the replete, the divine—the abundance and liquid nature of life, which even in its flowering, carnal presence eludes Billy’s full apprehension. I think of Psalm 1, which I also had written and sung about in New Harmony—the way Billy is blown like the chaff, how he steps in the ways of the wicked. This encounter—with the Wolf, the landscape, and the abundance of life overflowing, and despite all the violation and perdition to come—this is where Billy begins to rebuild his church.

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Throughout our growing up, mom was curious, creative, and story-fired. She also was angry, resentful, untrusting, and always very, very fearful. She exulted in our changes and refused them, mythologized our talents and pathologized our love. She preferred sentiment to affection, rejection to vulnerability. I’ve never seen pride worn more painfully. Her sword was all blade, no handle. And now we sit with her reaching for what cannot be held, flowers that feed on flesh, what blood and bone are made of but cannot themselves make, which is no flower but is swift and the wind is in terror of it and the world cannot lose it.

The figures we are for each other, child to mother and mother to child. Each of us, many-sided and charged with depths, is also someone’s conscripted avatar. To say this now, even to see it, feels risky. It risks our singleness, our autonomy. And yet I don’t want to resist this figurement altogether. I’m willing to give over to it. For beyond the ways we figure in one another’s dreams and desires there is the charge of the encounter. Mom’s fears and frustrations trace the pattern of her brokenness; her own church stood in ruins long before we were born. Yet amid that very brokenness a light breaks through: the light of a dignity that was made before her, which comes to her, to each of us, as a gift. And so now I get to see my sister smoothing her hair or kissing her brow, touches of nurturing and affection mom never would have countenanced during all those years she swirled like straw on the wind. Before that, before even she could possibly know, she was loved and held in love, and the love holds her still. Amid the shadows of her shattered dome, through the slats of the blinds looking out on the hatched grass and cars coursing along the parkway, somehow the radiance comes clearer.

Inside the Chapel of the Little Portion in New Harmony, four white walls and a frosted skylight softly clasp the sun. In place of an altar, there is a low table made from a millstone, flanked by two low stools. A place for encounter, for seeing eye to eye.

We come to the millstone not for judgement but accompaniment, wheat and chaff. There is a refining in the encounter.

I went out runnin
Just a quick spin around the park
I left the motor runnin
And now it’s gettin dark
And I keep on holdin
Holding out for the love and for the light
The light that’s left your eyes

And now I see I’m runnin
Runnin like a train without a name
Don’t know how to keep outrunnin
How to stay out in front of the shame
And I know that I’m outstandin
Like a horse in a big box store
And I don’t want to need it any more

And so I keep outrunnin
Tryin so hard to stay aloof
But I know that I am runnin
Runnin from a church without a roof
And I know the rain is comin
I can see it spread across the sky
And there’s no keepin dry

You know how it’s been for me since last June, when I stumbled into a stretch of the Damascus Road that runs secret along the Victoria Line of the London Underground. I mean that shift of gravity that I can only call by the name “conversion.” You’ll remember me recounting how suddenly I was struck, amid the swaying and banter and laughter of a group of Italian schoolkids as they came tumbling aboard—struck by the shine of their souls big enough to fill the universe, by the radical precious value of creatureliness in each one, and by the unassailable force that holds these together, which can only be called love. I wanted you to understand that for me, who too often finds passing notions or appearances “quite striking,” this perception was not a matter of being struck by a thought, but of being intoxicated and reorganized in a flash, riven and re-pieced into a new way of seeing.

It’s not that it wasn’t there—it was only that I couldn’t hear it. In one of the many theological dialogues in Cormac McCarthy’s books (this one from The Crossing, I think), someone observes that we only know God’s voice when it falls silent—when at the end of life we realize that the Divine had been speaking all along. Like the horses at night, another interlocutor suggests, whose grazing is only heard when the sudden silence of its ceasing wakes the sleeping riders from their bedrolls.

While this return to the wildness, weight, and weirdness of the Bible has been nourishing, regions of struggle and doubt remain. (May they never fade altogether!) Such places teem for me in the Psalms. I just don’t know how to read them. It’s all the smiting, the enemies, the wickedness; for every fruitful tree by flowing waters, there’s a baby dashed to the ground. There’s loads of scholarship and exegetics and apologetics about this, I know. (Have you found a way through the Psalms? I’d love to learn what's helped you move through them. Or maybe the whole thing turns you off. Maybe you’re worried for me now.) Anyway, what I’m trying to do for now is to treat them like a kind of dream. You know, how your therapist once said that everything in a dream is you? That enemy tribe bending low to lick the desert dust—it’s you. The wicked wearing their pride like a necklace? You. The stronghold of life, the level path, the flowing waters—you, you, you.

Which is to say, it’s me. Seeing the wicked ones within me, thinking how often I do battle with my own self, is giving me a way into David’s songbook.

I’ve made a start with Psalm 1. The problem of the wicked is there from the first—”Happy is the one who does not take the counsel of the wicked for a guide”—but by 1:3, the image arrives of a tree planted alongside flowing water, with foliage that never fades but forevers in abundance. The second half of the Psalm, however, seems to throw the wicked under the bus: “They are like chaff driven before the wind” who “when judgment comes… will not stand firm…. The way of the wicked is doomed.”

You know how I planned to stop in New Harmony, Indiana, on the way to visit mom in Illinois? The site of two utopian experiments in the first part of the nineteenth century, the town was important to theologian Paul Tillich, who influenced the philanthropy that supported its renascence in the mid twentieth century, and whose ashes are interred there.

Tillich is memorialized at New Harmony. Amid a waterside grove of pines a short walk from the banks of the Wabash, with the Chapel of the Little Portion shining in reflection, his memorial stone invokes the verse about the fruitful tree.

And yet Tillich knew that we finally find ourselves not in fruitful flourishing, but precisely in the midst of our withering. In his famous sermon, “You Are Accepted,” Tillich asks, “Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some ‘sinners’ and others ‘righteous’?” He proposes a renewal of the old understanding of sin as the state of separation. And separation, he contends, is the basis of our existence; in a sense, it is existence itself. It lends our experience a kind of parallax view, through which experience of both light and dark become possible.

With Tillich, the Psalm’s ways of the wicked and paths of the righteous begin to seem like a map of the meandering routes of life in all their forking variation. And yet they meander along the way of the living waters, where grace flows, sometimes to flood in on us—

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness.… It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: "You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!"

I don’t get the fruit without the flood, the tree without the chaff, the seed without the riving wind. The light comes dappled through the play of everlasting foliage. It shines in the dark, and yet the darkness does not overcome. I’ll sing it like that.

Happy is the one who’s hasn’t walked in the way of the wicked
Or followed in the paths of pain
Or sat in the company of scorn
His delight is in the word of the Holy One
It is in his meditations day and night
He shall be like a tree that fruits by flowing water
Leaves that ever prosper in green

But that is not the way it goes for me when I walk in the wicked
For then I’m like the straw
I swirl and blow and scatter on the wind
And then I cannot stand upright
The light and life and water feel like judgment
But He knows the way it goes on paths that ever brighter
My wickedness shall wither away.

I’ve found myself stretched and challenged by Pope Leo’s encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, which has helped to reset the public conversation about the perils of AI (perils that exist in the present, coarsening and riving us at every touchpoint). And beyond the horse-race punditry of so much of the media response, I’ve been grateful for nourishing commentary both appreciative and critical. Some thoughtful critics have pointed out how the encyclical blunts its effect in taking up some of the more shopworn tropes of tech criticism—in particular, the pale nostrum that tech is somehow “neutral.” For all the idolatrous evangelism of Silicon Valley, millions of users are turning to the bot not as oracle but as assistant—as a “tool,” anodyne and frictionless, with which to offload much of their mundane decision-making. Writing at the Hedgehog Review, Antón Barba-Kay incisively describes the serpentine infiltration of the technocratic paradigm with its framework of “habitual incentives that, once internalized, become practically imperative.”

In the same spirit, Mike Sacasas describes how the technocratic framework of utility, which poses problems of alignment and impact as mere matters of habit and skill, misses the extent to which technology is not a tool but an environment. Following Marshall McLuhan’s observation that tech works to “alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance,” Sacasas suggests that we might best understand AI as “a denial of service attack on the human psyche.” I find this framing resonant—and to be sure, there’s much in the encyclical that unpicks this pattern as well.

I want to say that Magnifica Humanitas does its most important work not where it seeks to apprehend technology, but where it reminds us of all that we bring to our encounter with it—and all that we risk losing to it. Again and again the encyclical steps back from a speculative and theoretical encounter with technology and its perils to express, enumerate, and celebrate the richness of being human. This homiletic thread struck me especially while listening to Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell’s recent, glorious conversation with Jack Hanson on their podcast, Know Your Enemy. I was moved by their recital of paragraphs 119 and 120 of the encyclical, where Leo voices the beauty and grace of our limits—the very limits of knowledge and the body which technocracy seeks to abolish. I will quote from them here:

Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today. Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them….

It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God…. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.

I found myself wanting not merely to assent to these words, but to pray with them. It was a curious and inexorable feeling. I have not made a practice of composing and sharing prayers; but a spiritual confidante whose fellowship I trust has encouraged me to share this one. And so here is a prayer for our limits, offered not for intercession or supplication but in adoration:

It is through your love, O Lord, that we learn to love our limits, 
which give force to our compassion
and shape to the fear we feel for others in their need; 
which nurture our generosity even as we fall and fail; 
which frame and enfold our measures of adoration. 
Confronted as we shall be by rejection, 
grieving as we must at the loss of all we hold dear, 
quaking as we do in the face of our failures, 
may we gather our wits, sense your nearness, 
and come to rest in the embrace of our entanglement.

We suffer from these limits and we learn from them. 
Without them, we would cease yearning even for love. 
To love, to learn, and to desire is to wound and be wounded. 
What a gift it is to be drawn into your woundedness, 
into this adventure of failure and freedom, disappointment and dream. 
In you, we affirm the tragedy and splendor and glorious mystery 
of being your body together; with you, we choose the human.

This is my editorial for the summer issue of Arnoldia, the magazine of the Arnold Arboretum, which comes out later this month. It’s full of good things: landscapes as archives, trees as elders, islands as forests, and the high-wire conservation of a spectacular Balkan conifer. Join the Arboretum today and we’ll mail you a copy!

Spend enough time in botanical gardens and arboreta and eventually someone will tell you that they aren’t “natural.” They are “designed landscapes,” and thus have none of the wild in them. Nature, according to this view, exists only in “intact” ecosystems. There is a history to this notion; we catch it in Thoreau and Muir. It comes into its quintessence with Aldo Leopold, who made the fine balance he observed among living things an ideal of stability. To be “stable,” to be “intact,” was for Leopold the essential quality of the living world.

I find this perspective unsatisfying, however. It pushes nature to the margins, into reserves and refugia (paradoxically making it another kind of garden).

Recently, I walked the grounds with someone who knows this place well. It was the turn of spring, the landscape moist and hushed, the dull roots stirring. And dotted here and there, smudges of rabbit fur—the traces of killings amid the plantings. Great-horned owls haunt the shadows of the trees; as spring ripens, young coyote make their way through the collections, keeping the secrets of their provenance. Soon, monarch butterflies will flit among the milkweed that hosts their caterpillars, which is found in abundance throughout the landscape. There is an element of design in this—our horticulturists foster herbaceous communities that include milkweed. These plants are not sited and planted, however, but turn up where conditions favor their flourishing. In a sense, milkweed’s presence is not so much a product of design as a revealer of its limits and horizons, and an indicator of the generous and generative ways in which the horticulturists care for this place—not as a walled garden, but a porous pattern, which other lives enter on their own terms.

There’s this poem by Robert Frost called “Design.” It’s troubled me for years. It opens on a “dimpled spider, fat and white,” perched on a “white heal‑all” (Prunella vulgaris, a common roadside and old-field plant), holding aloft the severed wings of a moth. Frost asks what purpose or meaning might be detected in this tableau:

What drove the spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.

If design govern in a thing so small. Perhaps the universe is designed, Frost seems to speculate—but not for the little ones. Frost is posing a question in what theologians call theodicy: the problem of evil in the world. For all our modern sophistication, predation prompts a visceral response, as it has for humans in many times and places. So much of life is suffering. In a good universe, what role do death and cruelty play?

And yet even Frost’s macabre scene, when looked at from another angle, becomes porous with possibility. The “moth” Frost seems to have observed might actually have been a butterfly—in particular, a clouded sulphur, Colias philodice, which often appears in white form, and for whom the heal‑all serves as a larval host. Perhaps before the spider took her, Frost’s “moth” had set her eggs gently down among the froth of the heal‑all. And what steered her there? The Darwinian imperative of reproduction, yes—but we know that impulse well enough ourselves to recognize its thickness and exultation.

Spider’s feast, owl pellet, coyote scat: the landscape proliferates with the marks of cruelty at every scale, uninvited, undesigned. The question, for gardeners as for theologians, is whether such scenes indicate a design flaw or instead, perhaps, resist the overreach of any design to banish contingency, whether in the form of death and decay or weedy flourishing.

Father Józef Tischner, the chaplain of Poland’s Solidarity movement, defined work as a “conversation in the service of life.” Writing about Tischner in his new book Solidarity: The Work of Recognition (Bloomsbury), Rowan Williams explains that labor is conversational to the extent that it is “a constant adjustment of meaning under the pressure of making practical sense of communal life.” (I thank the writing of scholar Alan Jacobs for the reference.) I would venture a definition of design in this same spirit: the shaping of making, planting, and tending in the service of life.

“It is perhaps a stretch of the imagination to speak about a ‘conversation of labor’ with the non‑human environment,” Williams continues. “But this is not nonsense: learning the intelligible patterns of the embodied life around us, learning what threatens it or enhances it, is at the very least analogous to conversation, analogous to the process by which we create an identity that is new, in which we and other material substances or agencies may find a co-operative mode of living together.”

A “designed landscape” maybe hopes to keep the cruelty at bay. A garden, however, with its hawks and rabbits, milkweed and monarchs, spiders and butterflies, is a landscape that has learned to listen—to accept that nature, for all its suffering, is fundamentally good, and that our creativity is truest when it cooperates with the good in all its fullness. The trees kept here keep this kaleidoscopic goodness, tell that story to the generations. I think of the forest in W. S. Merwin’s poem “Rain Light” rising beyond a garden whose flowers all “are forms of water”—the trees upon the hillside alight with “the washed colors of the afterlife,” which “lived here long before you were born,” and which “wake without a question / even when the whole world is burning.” Opening the conversation of design to the living world, we find our own horizons enlarged. And we are not appalled.

There’s a passage early in Walden, in the chapter “Economy,” which I find so intriguing. It goes like this:

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

What could he mean by this menagerie? What might they signify? Is this some kind of metaphor? Only a few lines later, Thoreau rejects metaphor:

But while we are confined to books, though the most select and classic, and read only particular written languages, which are themselves but dialects and provincial, we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor, which alone is copious and standard.

So the hound, the bay horse, the turtledove: if not metaphor, then what? A hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove. A hound a bay horse and a turtle dove…

A hound a bay horse and a turtle dove
I lost them on the way
I ask my fellow travelers
They don’t much to say
Some say they’ve met them in the field
Or escaping with the clouds
A hound bay horse and turtle dove
And all the names of love

The hound the bay horse and the turtle dove
How far they must have gone
I described to you the sounds they make
The howl the tramp the song
Like us they’ve lost the world the made
Like us they’ve lost the land
The hound the bay horse and the turtle dove
I see their tracks upon the sand

Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison

While we’re confined to books
We lose the language of
All the things that speak without
The cloak of metaphor
What have you lost that you can’t name
Something that left before
The hound, the bay horse and the turtle dove
First headed for the door

Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison

Like a zen koan, the tale of the hound, bay horse, and turtle dove is bracing and irresolvable. Zen practitioners are challenged to offer a presentation to demonstrate an intimacy with the koan’s ineffability, which is to say their realization, their grace, or their surrender. Thoreau would have rejected my Kyrie—Lord, have mercy—but it’s what welled up for me. The Kyrie, I think, is my presentation.

Thoreau doesn’t seem especially musical. I mean, can you imagine him at a dance? And yet there are moments in his writing, especially in Walden, of exquisite sensitivity to the music of the world—to the Aeolian and the electric, the sound of wind in the trees, of the telegraph wires crackling and whining, of the thrum in the train tracks. And stillness above all reveals itself as a kind of music, the finest refinement of ordered sound, the song of purity itself.

From the Journals, January 1, 1854:

The snow is the great betrayer. It not only shows the tracks of mice, otters, etc., etc., which else we should rarely if ever see, but the tree sparrows are more plainly seen against its white ground, and they in turn are attracted by the dark weeds which it reveals. It also drives the crows and other birds out of the woods to the villages for food. We might expect to find in the snow the footprint of a life superior to our own, of which no zoology takes cognizance. Is there no trace of a nobler life than that of an otter or an escaped convict to be looked for in the snow? Shall we suppose that that is the only life that has been abroad in the night? It is only the savage that can see the track of no higher life than an otter. Why do the vast snow plains give us pleasure, the twilight of the bent and half-buried woods? Is not all there consonant with virtue, justice, purity, courage, magnanimity? And does not all this amount to the track of a higher life than the otter’s, a life which has not gone by and left a footprint merely, but is there with its beauty, its music, its perfume, its sweetness, to exhilarate and recreate us? Where there is a perfect government of the world according to the highest laws, is there no trace of intelligence there, whether in the snow or the earth, or in ourselves? No other trail but such as a dog can smell? Is there none which an angel can detect and follow? None to guide a man on his pilgrimage, which water will not conceal? Is there no odor of sanctity to be perceived? Is its trail too old? Have mortals lost the scent? The great game for mighty hunters as soon as the first snow falls is Purity, for, earlier than any rabbit or fox, it is abroad, and its trail may be detected by curs of lowest degree. Did this great snow come to reveal the track merely of some timorous hare, or of the Great Hare, whose track no hunter has seen?

Here’s how it comes to me in song:

New-fallen snow is the great betrayer
Of all those things we rarely ever see
Driver of crows, darker weeds revealed
And sparrows plainly to be seen
And sparrows plainly to be seen

Still we expect to see something greater
Shall we suppose life is all we see?
Virtue justice purity and courage
And magnanimity
And magnanimity

Does it amount to
A trace of higher life
In the bent and buried woods?

More than a footprint. bearing its beauty
Its music and its sweetness exhilarating us
Where there’s perfection, is there no intelligence
Whether in snow, or earth, or in ourselves?
Or have we lost its scent?
I fear we’ve lost its scent

Did the great snow come
Merely to reveal
The tracks of tiny hares?

Or is it the Great Hare
Whose track no hunter’s ever seen
Whose track no hunter’s ever seen

Fiercely anticlerical, Thoreau was a reluctant metaphysician. But he could be coaxed into speculations on spirit that drew both from his wide reading (not only the Bible but the Upanishads. Persian poetry, and many other voices) and his magnificent attention to the natural world. He opened up with unusual insight and intimacy in correspondence with a Unitarian minister in Worcester, MA, Harrison Blake. Their collected letters are full of spirit.

Coleman Barks, the poet and translator of Rumi who died earlier this year, likens Thoreau and Blake to Rumi and Shams, noting that Blake headed a small coterie of Worcester seekers who would gather at his house to listen to him read Thoreau’s letters as they arrived:

This practice reminds one of how St. Paul’s epistles might have been received in Corinth and also of how the journals of Sufi masters were used in the middle ages, as a focus for conversation (sohbet) of a high order. Jelaluddin Rumi met with companions to read from his father Bahauddin’s spiritual diary. One version of the meeting of Rumi and Shams of Tabriz says that that was the book Shams pushed into the fountain when he told Rumi, “Now you must live what you have been reading about.”

In Henry’s words from an 1848 letter especially, I hear him enunciating a kind of creed, and an anthem, a song of exaltation:

I do believe in the outward and the inward life;
that if any should succeed to live a higher life,
others would not know of it;
that difference and distance are one
The outward is only the outside of that which is within.

Men are not concealed under habits, but revealed by them;
they are their true clothes.

I do believe something, and there is nothing else but that.
I know that I am.
I know that another is who knows more than I,
who takes interest in me,
whose creature and kindred am I.

I know that the enterprise is worthy.
I know that things work well.
I have heard no bad news.

No bad news—a hard thing to say! I think of Julian of Norwich: and all shall be well.

I’ve noticed that there are two students in every class whose names I learn first: the one who speaks the most, and the one who speaks not at all. As the pattern of the class takes shape, these two have a say in its success as a learning exercise and as a community.

As the recent semester drew to a close, I found myself wondering, what is the pattern of the college class? What is its compact, its qualities; what world does it come from or constitute? My friend S. and I have been discussing “pattern languages,” the concept of which comes from the work of architect Christopher Alexander, who developed this understanding of the “timeless way of building” with collaborators Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, and others at Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Structure in the 1970s. Interestingly, there isn’t a “classroom” pattern per se in their 1977 book, A Pattern Language, though such education-related patterns as NETWORK OF LEARNING and SHOPFRONT SCHOOLS are proposed there. Though they feel as though they preexist, that they are not invented but discovered, patterns are less archetypes than aspirations. Open, porous, and radically accessible, so many of them seem to assume relations of trust as a deep resource.

But what of the class itself—that “social institution – workgroup” (patterns 80–86) in which we find ourselves, twelve or twenty or ninety or two hundred students and an instructor, thrown together into this space of expectation, this envelope of institutional mandate, normative hierarchy, and hope for the future, which is the university? Increasingly, I’m aware how little of what happens here, how little of what it means or will come to mean, is determined by that envelope: by the role of higher education in society, say, or the importance of accrued expertise, or the promise of potential.

The writer Paul Elie defines pilgrimage as “a journey taken in light of a story.” To call a class a journey feels shopworn; to call it a pilgrimage, however enlivens it, I think. As pilgrims, we thirteen or thirty-three or ninety-nine go forth in search of the story we will share. Success in the classroom, I’m coming to understand, isn’t a “journey” with the institution as the ship, but is bound up with the discovery of our shared story. Though the story exists before we coax it into presence, this crucially is a beginning and not an end.

The idea of a shared story has fallen on hard times, however. Scandalized by master narratives, we have sought after a seeming lightness in jettisoning the weight of story, falling back on that normative envelope—the “we believe in” of class, college, science, truth; of institution, and order, and rubric. Under the sign of the journey, the class becomes less a pilgrimage than the concourse of some shadowy station, all of us bustling toward our private trains, our own special destinations—a grade, a degree, a job, a like, an evaluation.

The story is patient, however; it waits at the edges of those shadows; it asks only for trust in its discovery. Trust is the pilgrim’s path: trust that sustenance will be offered along the way; trust that one’s fellow pilgrims will teach us and fortify us; trust that we have a guide who recognize the pattern of the way well enough to know its marks even in a changed land. Often the teacher will be this guide, though sometimes someone else from the fellowship will stand and say, just here, I know the way. Their ferocity, their fiat, depends on the trust, however. We all depend on it.

In class, this constellation of trust, this shelter, is the pattern we follow, the habit in which we attire ourselves. The coming-together is ephemeral, and yet it’s the nature of the pattern, and of the stories in light of which we venture forth, to linger long after our fellowship comes to its formal end.

The pattern of the class—the coming together, the rustle of papers, the settle and the setting forth—nurtures this trust, frames it and enfolds it. The pattern is no guarantee, though it will hold the trust with so much more intimacy and strength than any institutional envelope. For we must give ourselves to trust. It is in the nature of the gift.

The story we seek was here before the blossoming of the trust. But if the story is to be found or coaxed forth, this flowering happens before the story may be found. We might have glimpses of the story, the way a pilgrim’s shadow pinioned in the mist will feel like a fellow traveler; the way a deer will browse slowly ahead on the path, attentive even in its disinterest, in its being before and beyond us. Long before the story is caught or drawn close, however, the trust must bloom. And the one who would be silent finds strength of voice; and the one who would speak first finds the silence and helps to hold it open.

When trust trembles on a knife’s edge and the story keeps its distance, there is a dusky chill of enormity in the air. As pilgrims, we ply the edge of that uncertainty, the abyss of it. And sometimes, as we have been told, the abyss looks back; sometimes, the abyss finds its own dark ferocity. In this transit, so much depends on the silent one; the silent one carries such a weight. And we begin to wonder—will the silent one break? Is it in the nature of this silent one to break?

For my class and me this term, the pattern held; the speaker and the silent one came together to carry and to compensate, and the story stole forth and fed from our hands. And yet we were reminded how fragile, how vulnerable, the pattern remains. In the advent of this vulnerability, I felt keenly how the trust has been failed again and again in our time. And I felt the pressure of that failure take the form of fear.

S. reminds me how little we rely in patterns, now, with the modern injunction to make it new giving rise to the existential injunction to find one’s own story. We’re all stumbling through the dusky station, it’s near to midnight, and the last trains are leaving without us. And yet I think it in the nature of the pattern to do its work even in the ruins; that out of the pattern’s matrix, the primordium of the story may open and unfurl and offer itself as gift. We must accept the gift, however, if the pattern is to hold, if its language is to persist. And in trust, S. suggests, in its conjugation of courage and humility, we may find a doorway open to virtue as well.

So the gift is received in trust, a trust that is no mere given, no contrivance of doors and keycards, of who gets in and who is kept out. It’s something we make and hold together. I don’t think that even violence can destroy the pattern. But it makes living into the trust of it ever harder. For the story again and again is uprooted and cast aside. And it is there that violence grows, not in the broken envelope, but in the disturbed soil where the story once grew.

I was scrolling through Instagram Sunday morning when a short video caught my attention, of 14-year-old Wendy Lou Holcombe playing her banjo for an aged woman in a nursing home (via @dimestoreradio on Instagram). Holcombe, a country-music prodigy of the late 1960s and 70s, asks the elderly woman if she’d like her to play a tune, and the woman says yes; Holcombe glances at her fretboard conspiratorially, sets her tongue in her teeth, and launches into a riffling version of “Cripple Creek.” Over the spillway come the notes, and the shot cuts from Holcombe’s intent and relishing face to the aged woman tapping in time on the arm of her wheelchair. As the music peals on, the woman folds her hands, looks aside, seems to go inward. Holcombe finishes the tune, stops the strings into silence; she shuts her eyes, riven by the passing of some fleeting thing; she reaches out and lays her hand on the woman, and then bends in to kiss her on the cheek and embrace her. Do you love me? the woman asks in a welling, cracked voice; oh yes ma’am, Holcombe whispers, her own voice hushed, overwhelmed. Then tell me what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do with myself, you tell me what to do.

This moment holds so much—Holcombe’s preternatural music and presence, of course, and the generosity and relish with which she offers it. Much more, her deep, intuitive response to the older woman, her own great emotion apprehending the woman’s state in the midst of the music. The elderly woman’s question, naked and brave: do you love me? Moved by the music, the flung-open treasury of the music, its great beauty and purity, a priceless thing freely given, the old woman overcoming some heartbreaking incredulity to arrive at love as the only possible reason for this bounty. And then her appeal: tell me what to do with myself. Stripped of her powers she seems, denied even the powers of elderhood, and bereft; and in the circle of beauty made by Holcombe and her music, she feels the presence of a divine power, a wisdom, a welling.

Tell me what to do with myself. I’ve listened to my mother make similar appeals from her nursing-home chair, and have found myself disconcerted at the poverty of my reply, confounded for anything like an answer. There is a distant cock’s cry in these moments that I can’t shut out.

The social-media clip of Wendy Lou Holcombe is taken from the first episode of Big Blue Marble, a series for children that aired on public television beginning in 1974. I remember watching the show, each episode of which consisted of several segments profiling young people living here and there around the world. I don’t remember viewing Holcombe’s segment as a child, though I doubt I could have seen in it then what I see now.

Holcombe’s visit to the Briarcliff Nursing Home begins at about 14:25 in the episode, below. Before Holcombe plays, she asks the old woman for a verse, and she recites both “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and “Yes, Jesus Loves Me.” The words come through great effort, shorn of melody, and yet I suspect their music rang for her.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star. Each episode of Big Blue Marble opens with an image of the earth passing behind the surface of the moon, its craters and gray blankness filling the screen and then sliding away to reveal the earth again, reprising the “Earthrise” photo taken during the Apollo 8 lunar orbital mission of December, 1968. Strings swell, and a singer’s voice cuts in—The Earth's a big blue marble when you see it from out there—as we zoom into a closer view of the earth before cutting to scenes of young people engaged in work and play around the globe.

I was born during the Apollo 8 mission, and so Earthrise always catches my eye; the imagery now hit me with special force, as astronaut James Lovell had died a few days earlier at the age of 97. Better remembered for his role as commander of the Apollo 13 mission, Lovell also was a member of the Apollo 8 crew, alongside Bill Anders and Frank Borman. I love the audio recording captured on board from the moment the Earthrise photo was made: Anders catching first sight of the earth appearing from beyond the moon and exclaiming in wonder; Lovell’s husky voice murmuring, oh man; Anders urgently pestering Lovell to pass him a camera loaded with color film as the spacecraft moves and the view shifts from one window to the next, Lovell eager to take the picture: I’ve got it right here, Bill! while an impatient Anders barks now calm down, Lovell, calm down! In this moment, the spacecraft is still coming out of the far-side half of its lunar orbit, not yet in radio contact with controllers back on earth, and the astronauts are able to let down their professional mien and be wanderers, wonderers, camera bugs angling for the shot.

In retirement, Jim Lovell headed several technology and manufacturing firms; Ron Howard’s 1995 film about the Apollo 13 incident brought renewed fame, and he became an affable public voice for the history and the significance of the Apollo program. Bill Anders, who took the Earthrise photo, died in 2024 at the age of 90 when the single-engine plane he was piloting crashed into the waters near Orcas Island in Washington.

Were there ever moments in their later years when even such men as these—renown, decorated, massively accomplished—asked, what am I to do with myself?

Wendy Lou Holcombe died from a congenital heart condition at the age of 23. I see the moon, especially when it is full as it is now, and I think, that’s what 200,000 miles looks like. But now I wonder if the distance spanned by Holcombe in that moment in the Briarcliff Home was somehow much greater.

The brothers dispersed to their cars, the grounds quietened. When my call ended I went back to the door, where a woman in a green apron sitting under the liftgate of her Subaru smoking a cigarette saw me mashing the button and came over with a fob to let me in, drawling about membership and its privileges. Inside, I found my mom dozing in front of her television, where Little House on the Prairie had been running in continuous, episode-by-episode download the last few days. In the episode playing as I arrived, Mrs. Olsen’s lies were getting out of hand, and the Ingalls children were fixing to teach her a lesson. I quietly took a seat, watching Laura’s bonnet waggle as she ran off to exact her justice, and thought of Hannah Armstrong. I’d recently picked up The Sangamon, the poet Edgar Lee Masters’ book about my home region, and it had fallen open to an arresting drawing of Armstrong, who figures in Masters’ more famous Spoon River Anthology. A sounding of the dead, Spoon River comprises a chorale of testimonies, recollections, and excuses from the grave. Many of Masters’ sources for those poems lived in my hometown and the surrounding area.

In Spoon River, Armstrong recalls a visit she paid to Abraham Lincoln in the White House, where she travelled to secure the discharge of her son from the Army:

And when he saw me he broke in a laugh,
And dropped his business as president,
And wrote in his own hand Doug's discharge,
Talking the while of the early days,
And telling stories.

Her portrait in The Sangamon offers us a frank burl of a face framed with a Little-House bonnet of petalled crenellations; the caption reads, “HANNAH ARMSTRONG HAD BREEDING AND WAS A WOMAN OF EXCELLENT CHARACTER.”

When it was time for my mom to go to lunch, I left and drove out to visit my father’s grave in Oakland Cemetery, where Edgar Lee Masters also lies. It’s a twenty-mile drive over the plains, the long-period blink of corn and beans, corn and beans, varying where the creeks meander here and there across the Jefferson grid. As I drove out of town and up into these horizons, the phone call came back to mind, my breath started to catch, I felt the quaver blossom again in my chest. First subtly and then all of a sudden, I felt the words come: I am a ghost. I am a ghost. I felt inescapably like an invisible presence hurtling over the fields, untouchable and untouching.

I called Rebekah from the road, and our talk dispelled the panic but not the haunted ideation. Later, my teacher reminded me of the koan, “Save a ghost,” one of the so-called miscellaneous koans of the Zen tradition, which is haunted by “hungry ghosts” who carry into death the burden of their appetite—for money or food or sex; for happy talk or self-regard; for solace. Most of the characters in Spoon River are hungry ghosts; Hannah Armstrong is one of the few exceptions. But it was another ghostly condition that had struck me as fear and grief wrapped itself around me on the road: not hunger, but disconnection. Being without becoming, the story going on without me. The story, the story, of all I hold dear; of all those who through grieving will come to get on with it; of projects and prospects and deeds and deliverables. Corn and beans, corn and beans, sown and grown without me, without me, as I hurtle along endlessly untouchable and untouching.

I say “not hunger but disconnection,” but is there really any difference?

At the cemetery, I placed a stone on my dad’s grave and another on behalf of Rebekah. Dad’s grave is in an open area, along with many of the newer plots, beyond the eaves of the trees that canopy the older graves. I retreated to their shade, sitting on the roots of an old sweetgum while the wind played in the grass, feeling its way into the underbrush that crops up at the edge of the cemetery. It was a gentling wind, an easy wind, and it coaxed me into curiosity. I wandered over toward Masters’ grave, passing names of parents of childhood friends; the name of a classmate, felled last year by the chronic illness that had stalked her even in high school; names I know from tire shops, insurance companies, and farms up and down the Sangamon and in and out of town.

Masters’ grave is marked for pilgrim tourists by a bright blue sign, and as I made my way toward it, I stopped by another one so marked: the burial site of Ann Rutledge, who also appears in Spoon River. The supposed first love of Abraham Lincoln, she died young, before Lincoln’s rise. Masters’ poem, carved on her memorial as an actual epitaph, imagines her demise as a kind of civic apotheosis: “Bloom forever, O republic/From the dust of my bosom!”

I have visited Ann’s grave many times; I feel no hunger there. There’s a vague disquiet, but it doesn’t belong to Ann. This time, I thought of myths that turn women into trees to escape the hungry ghosts known as gods. What a metamorphosis Masters lays on Rutledge: from her dust, no tree, but a nation! I found myself wanting a word from one who could dispell this burden, who could sing a release from the poet’s strange appetite.

Turning from Ann’s fenced grave, I caught sight of a third blue sign beyond Masters’:

Hannah Armstrong! I had never known or else had forgotten that she is buried here, too.

With Hannah, no hunger, not today. Only the wind, the trees, the birdsong, and the clement, midsummer silence of the lands sloping away to the river beyond, a silence buoyed by the green crackle of growth subliminal. The silence of all these names, these ancestors, shaken loose from the hungry epitaphs, not roused to reckless, untouchable flight, but rising in widening circles of fruitful solace. And in the sangha of the ancestors, I felt the caress of a story—or maybe not a story, but a great song—which doesn’t go on without me, but in which I’m already incorporated.

Save a ghost.

A few days ago, I was trying to introduce my students to Michel Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, of a place where other times and places meet. I’d recently been riveted by something John Berger says in a late interview about tenderness as the “refusal to judge,” mentioned in a draft piece of writing shared by my friend, the creative and insightful thinker Kyle Parry.1 This tenderness, Berger suggests, flowers from the way we ackowledge and attend to the dead, the manner in which we invite them into our lives. In the process of working out what he means by this, he returns to a story that he told many times in books and interviews, of his father’s experience in the trenches of the Great War. Berger comes to the realization that his life, his very existence, is rooted in those trenches, in the horrors of the war and his father’s survival. And not only in that survival—not only in the bare-life fact that had his father not survived, he would never have lived. No, beyond this, the recognition that his life, himself in his own possibility, had accompanied his father through the war. And what is life—what are we as individuals, really—but the magnificence of our possibility?

Berger explores this condition of life before life most urgently and intimately in a poem, “Self-portrait 1914–18.” “It seems now that I was so near to that war,” Berger begins; “I was born eight years after it ended.” And yet he was there—amid the “Very Light and shrapnel/On duck boards/Among limbs without bodies.” In light of flares and the charnel misery of the trenches, he was his father’s “groundless hope of survival.” And he concludes that “Before I could see/Before I could cry out/Before I could go hungry/I was the world fit for heroes to live in.”

After reading his poem, Berger invokes the country people of southern France among whom he lived the last decades of his life; among them, “it is a completely accepted fact that they live with the dead, that the dead are here, that they will be the dead, and that the dead are there … to help them die.” This relation with the dead is very different from a mere sense of the presence of the past, he suggests, with the susceptibility to nostalgia this breeds.

And so in the poem we have the sense of this grim soldier, smeared with mud, bleeding, hungry, cradling in his kit the very future world—and even more, that future reaching back to him with tenderness, with the refusal to judge. Though to say “reaching back” is wrong—for the future was there with him under the flares, amid the mustard gas. “To speak of the promise of poetry would be misleading,” Berger writes elsewhere, “for a promise projects into the future, and it is precisely the coexistence of future, present, and past that poetry proposes. A promise that applied to the present and past as well as the future can better be called an assurance.”

So I shared the Berger interview with my students, and then we looked at another film, about the British folk singer Sam Lee going into the woods at night to sing with nightingales. The birds have sung this way for millions of years, Lee says; we’ve evolved listening to them. As “one of the few night birds who will sing consistently,” Lee suggests, they are “midwives and sires to us as language and song carriers. And to think that in the million years plus that humans have been evolving, that in my lifetime I might hear the last nightingale—that’s incomprehensible.” And so Lee seeks the music in music’s very possibility, which is the nightingale. “I’ve learned to be in their presence while holding the concept of catastrophe,” he says, “as well as adoration.”

I shared Lee’s film about the nightingales in class because I wanted to talk about how art can turn a place into a portal to other times and places, to other possibilities. That always, already, we were alive in the dark among the leaves in the notes the nightingale sings. To sing with nightingales in the night of now is to do something more than establish a fleeting interspecies encounter—it’s to recognize that encounter as originary and ongoing.

As Lee spoke about the millions of years nightingales sang before us, and the enormity of their possible loss, I realized that he and Berger were saying the same thing: that both past and future are present, and that we owe our tenderness to both, not as mere possibilities, but as companions, as kin. For Berger, the dead are present, and to live with the presence of the dead is to give ourselves to time with tenderness. Tenderness for a father-to-be cowering in a bunker; tenderness for the long-ago birds hurtling north to sing their hearts to the night. Tenderness for the dead, whose time is our time, and tenderness for this nightingale time, too.

And now, I think of the past to which I am present. My father’s maternal grandfather came to this country in 1909, settled on the south side of Chicago, raised a family. When I was diagnosed with a BRCA-related cancer in 2020, I turned to genealogy in hopes of understanding how the gene had found its way to me. In the records of a ship that left Liverpool and landed in New York in 1909, I found my great-grandfather’s name with the text “race: Hebrew / language: Russian” entered into the manifest. Now, my siblings and I were raised as midwestern methodists with little knowledge of our father’s family. Dad (who died from complications of his own BRCA-related cancer in 2010) never mentioned his grandfather’s ancestry. We don’t know whether he knew about it; it never came up in family conversations, although the connection between Ashkenazic ancestry and certain BRCA deletions was understood when his cancer appeared.

Berger looks back and finds that he was a world “fit for heroes to live in.” What world were my siblings and I for our great-grandfather? Before I could see or go hungry, was I a refuge or a getaway, an emancipation or an escape? This world of midwestern methodism, of cancers and forgetting, for whom was it a fit future?

Any answer breaks the heart.

What tenderness do I owe this ancestor? What assurance can I offer, what promise can I make? These questions land with special force now, as those who pledge themselves to imagined pasts set out to destroy the promises of generations—to erase the possibility of such promises—to crush tenderness, including this tenderness of the living for the dead, wherever they find it. What can we do but pledge our tenderness for the dispossessed, for the neighbor, the student, the refugee; tenderness for our fearful ones, the ones now in flight? What can we do but offer this tenderness for the nightingale, too? To name what we can name, to embrace it with our language and our voice? To offer this assurance, to hold past, present, and future as tenderly as we can; for they—nightingales, heroes, escapees, the dispossessed—also are ourselves.

It might seem a strange leap from songbird conservation to the mysteries of long-dead ancestors. But I think there is an ecology of ancestry at work here, tracing its line from Berger through Lee, across no-man’s land and the Pale of Settlement, through the eons that midwife music and meaning. Just as these worlds were alive in the millions of years of nightingale time, so do untold possible worlds lie within our world—within ourselves. To these dead and not-yet-dead, what assurance can we give?

Catastrophe; adoration. I hear a song in these words, or a chant, which is to say, a prayer. For rigor when it comes to actions; for song as the tenderness of language.

The first time I saw a hummingbird clearwing moth, I was working for the summer as a lifeguard at my town pool, teaching children to tread water and refereeing open swim. Adolescence being a phase of mimicry, I also was observing the habits of my two co-workers with great care. They were both older and, to me, impossibly popular: Mark played basketball and was the youngest of a large cast of siblings; he wore his charisma with a kind of baffled entitlement, like an older brother’s football jersey. Annette, the only female member of our cross-country running team, was an amasser of vast lonely mileages, and I came to understand that running was her costume and refuge.

Though both of them were as broken and frightened as any other teens I knew, Mark and Annette craftily hid their vulnerabilities beneath the adornments of popularity, and as the youngest of the pool staff, I felt like a different form of life altogether. As Annette did with her running, I made water my refuge, prizing its dappled, blurry costume, the liquid freedom it afforded. 

The pool glimmered inside dusky barn of concrete block tacked onto one end of the high school. A garage door opened on a sun-scorched patio, where eighth-graders lay out on towels, working on their long-term dermatological outcomes. Annette usually took her guarding shift there, resplendent in her Ray-Ban oblivion, a feral, governing angel in repose just outside the dark and dinsome pool. One afternoon, Mark and I were tending the window where swimmers checked in for lessons and open swim. Shoals of children already splashed pealingly in the water while we gazed out on the bare gravel drive and the distant fringe of trees. From out of the humid, luminous air beyond the safety glass, an improbably-heavy insect helicoptered into the entryway: the size and shape of a large-caliber bullet, wings a buzz-saw blur of menace, head honed to hollow-point protuberance, abdomen flocked and finned. It was army green overall, and lovely as a weapon. It was some kind of hornet, we agreed, and when it settled on the ceiling, its windowpane wings focused instantly into stillness. Mark boggled, cursed, huffed in wonder. “We can’t let it get into the pool area,” he concluded, ducking to peer upward. The legs of the rusty folding chair shrieked as he pushed it into place beneath the creature’s perch. I wanted to stop him, but stood powerless, entranced by the prodigious bug. Wielding a foam paddleboard, Mark crouched on the chair and thwacked upward with frantic strength. The insect burst like something ripe, its innards raining down, one jetting gob sticking to Mark’s upper lip like a spitball as he squinched his eyes shut and froze in nauseated agony. After a horror-frozen spell, he howled and fled to the locker room.

I didn’t recognize the insect Mark had squished. Only years later, recollecting the moment, did I realize that it had been a hummingbird clearwing moth (and harmless as such). Strange how memory can so surely name a once-nameless thing.  

Hummingbird clearwing, Hemaris thysbe: the scientific binomial and the common name a weave of intersecting memorabilities. The hummingbird picture is clear in the blur of its wings and the velvet heaviness of its body as it hovers and swerves amid nodding flowers, in the way it buries its snout in blossoms to drink nectar with a reticulated, surgical tongue. But is the moth a picture of the hummingbird, or the bird a reflection of the moth? Moths have existed much longer than hummingbirds—and many of the clearwing moths (the Sesiidae, a family some 1500 species strong) resemble bees and wasps as much as birds. To mimic a stinging insect confers protection. But the costume of Hemaris thysbe is distinctly that of the hummingbird, which arose around the same time the first clearwing moths appeared. It’s hard to see the benefit in looking like a hummingbird—or, for that matter, in a bird looking like a moth. Their shared traits seem convergent, shaped by the constraints of the nectar-sipping life. Seen this way, then, are they a kind of memory of flowers? What might it be in a hummingbird or a moth that is the striving of flowers to remember?

Massed blossoms hide predators; the bright bouquet conceals clasping beaks and pious, poised mantid claws. To hover is to picture the lunge that haunts the petals. Other insect structures recall the wiles of flowers themselves, like the then-unknown sphinx moth whose existence Darwin postulated upon observing Madagascar’s comet orchid, whose nectaries hide at the bottom of slender spurs nearly a foot deep. The known sphinxes had mouthparts no longer than their bodies; pondering the comet orchid, Darwin suggested that a companion moth would be found with a tongue as long as 10 or 12 inches. The moth in question, when identified two decades later, was given the subspecies name prædicta. The moth’s long tongue was not a foretelling, however, but a memory trace, the slow evolutionary co-inscription of orchid and insect.

There’s a lot of current interest in the question of plant intelligence: do they feel, plan, communicate? In their very forms, plants remember the creatures that depend on them. The Americas are dotted with trees whose fruit once fed now-extinct megafauna: the Osage orange of the American Midwest, the jícaro or calabash tree of Mexico, even the avocado, all seem to have evolved for dispersal by the likes of ground sloths, mastodons, and gomphotheres. With massy fruits, tough outer shells, and durable, slippery seeds, they mostly confound the smaller mouths left behind by the Quaternary extinction event that arrived with humans in the Americas. Once flourishing widely, these trees withdrew into refugia in the long post-extinction era, until people began to cultivate them. Growing up in Illinois, I knew the fruit of the Osage orange as the “hedgeapple,” a name that recalls the tree’s use as a windbreak and boundary marker on nineteenth-century farms. But the dense, moist, friable fruit, softball-sized, which we piled in the woods and pelted each other with in pitched battles, evolved to appeal to the grinding molars of extinct proboscideans. I look at these fruit now and feel the crunch of the mastadon’s bite, feel the tuberculate rind tearing, the milky latex mixing in the great chomping mouth, the cucumber scent of the flesh on the exhale.

And then there are the stick insects, in the order Phasmatodea. Named for ghosts and apparitions, the phasmids seem an order in the religious as much as the taxonomic sense, a sect of phytophiles who give themselves wholly to the habit of stem and leaf. And yet these critters are hungry ghosts, who eat the foliage they ape. Phasmids are mostly nocturnal, spending the daytime almost cataleptic, trembling in the wind, seeking shade in the foliage they mimic. At night, they rise and move about like the dream-bodies of the leaves.

I think of those words that come unbidden to Mrs. Ramsay In To the Lighthouse: “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”

Am I too a phasmid, a hungry ghost? That afternoon by the pool, without knowing how to read the hummingbird clearwing moth, Mark and I had opened another archive: we remembered how to fear, and how to strike. The twitch, the recoil, the startled heart, the sudden intake of breath—who wrote this script? What ancestral horrors have settled into the shared body of the species, leaving their trace in triggers?

I want to think of mimicry as a form of memory, a distinct scribal hand in the broad magisterium of evolution’s uncanny inscriptions. Mimicry depends on memory for its propagation, as predators’ past encounters with toxic prey must be too memorable for heredity to ignore. The similarity of bees, hummingbirds, and clearwing moths makes a more complicated record, however, as none of these creatures are especially toxic or dangerous. Instead, their traits are convergent—the memory not of toxic encounters, but shared ways of being.

In its Latin name, the clearwing moth indexes another register of memory: Hemaris thysbe: “Thisbe’s blood.” Upon finding Thisbe’s cloak torn and bloodied beneath the mulberry tree and taking it as evidence that his beloved was killed, Pyramus threw himself on his sword. The moth’s wings are fretted with sanguine cames, blood-red veins that recollect the gory traces on Thisbe’s shawl. Before the taxonomists thought of hummingbirds or hornets, they remembered their Ovid.

Another desert tortoise conservationist, Tim Shields, who estimated that he’d logged 35,000 miles on foot in more than 45 years, felt a sort of spiritual apprenticeship with the animal. “My career has been the discovery of this earthling that has figured out how to survive,” he said, noting that the species has been around for as long as 20 million years. “I mean, a desert tortoise has seven ways to drink rainwater that I’ve witnessed in the field. We have this lesson to learn, that we can give to other earthlings.”

—Mark Sundeen profiles the itinerant naturalists who find human remains in the Mojave desert in the latest issue of Outside. This ragtag, tight-knit community of tortoise counters crisscrosses the desert to save an endangered species; when a tortoise-counting couple find the remains of a long-missing mother, their world intersects with the human misery the desert attracts—and the mystery of that misery, as confounding as the natural world is wondrous.

These images are splinters of a deeper fracture: our growing estrangement from the natural world, a severance that has kindled climate change and ushered in the sixth mass extinction. Perhaps more importantly, on a smaller scale, they are eroding our collective sense of wonder. It's tragic that every time we encounter a stunning plant online, our first instinct should be to question if it’s real or artificially created.

—Giovanni Aloi writing about a deluge of delusion, as AI-generated images of impossible plants—rainbow-hued roses; house-sized hostas—flood social media and other retail platforms. I find these images fascinating for their kinship with evolved mimicry (phasmids and other insect mimics get this treatment, too; see the “lotus mantid” on Instagram). Generated from a vast collective archive, they derive their affectiveness as much from nature’s increasing unfamiliarity as from any algorithmically-driven versimilitude. As online imagery replaces encounters with the natural world, are we losing the “feeling for the organism”?

Is this what Shakespeare is doing in the Sonnets? Caressing, huddling under the rain, reaching for these conjunctions through language sounds? And where is the beloved in this reaching? Where is Sudnow’s Audrey? Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day? asks Sonnet 34—a question that felt to me like the music of that sonnet, the feeling tone to return to in reprise. But didst thou promise? Or in my reaching for the sounds, in the caress of them, did I make it all up?

Reprise; reprisal.

Sudnow suggests that these movements of the hand in making music aren't about anything—they aren't mere commentary. A caress isn't about anything. It is the thing itself. And in music, in singing, in saying, we're moving, moving our bodies, moving feelingly, in and out of phase. And then, arrestingly, Sudnow writes this: "I used to think I would gladly be a dolphin if I could retain but one human expression: 'Wow'. But that 'wow' is only another bodily experience. It does not comment on the experience. It is part of the way of having it."

So I think that, with Shakespeare, we’re the dolphin here. And language isn't the saying, it's the sea. All the ways of saying "wow": fins and flippers, smooth skin and sleek head, moving through this medium and moving it. The sea sprays, swirls, eddies. But what's being caressed? Is it you, is it me? Is it the sea? Such a beauteous day!

So here comes another sonnet, Sonnet 97, reaching in toward me from its long-period orbit, blundering into the caress of a riff I've been carrying in my fingers these last couple of weeks.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness every where!
And yet this time removed was summer's time,
The teeming autumn big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit,
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

The sonnet suggests a cosmology: start with the assumption that you are a world—a wandering world, wandering through other atmospheres, passing through the vapor globes of others, unsettling one another's seas. Where does your energy come from; whence the light, the heat? Do you derive some portion of it from another, some vagrant thou who also wanders, planetary, throwing off influences and energies, irradiating everything it comes into a tangle with? Perhaps they're following their own foreordained course, but from your vantage, they dance in epicycles, they loom and withdraw. And you only catch glimpses, glimpses and swoons, as they come into conjunction and opposition, wax and wane, rearranging your clouds and unsettling your seas. In winter, their word can be a surfeit of sunshine playing over every part of you, while withdrawal draws the sap from the trees and sets a frost on the flowers even in summertime.

Lodged up here in the Sonnets' haunted observatory, I think of the conjunctions of Venus. To look down on the planets in their courses like Copernicus taught us to do, we would see Venus following a nearly-circular orbit, the most circular of the planets, with a period of 224.7 days. Seen from earth, however, it spirographs in a pattern called a "precessing pentagram," looming closer and then widening away in a pattern that repeats shiftingly every 2900 days or so. To map the travels of Venus from an Archimedean distance directly above our north pole, then, we see this pentragrammetry inscribing a pattern of loops and leavings that's been called the rose of Venus. It's beautiful:

This is not the music of the spheres in the abstract, Copernican sense, in the purity of their proportions. This is the music of bodies coming and going, tugging at one another, opening and closing to one another. As David Sudnow puts it, "the universal harmony of our "pure tones" is a harmony of the body's purity and not of some idealized nature…. It is no accident that the sequential arrangement of the tones of the major scale on the piano and the capacity of an opposable thumb go quite elegantly together.... Notice that the distances between places of the major scales, our most common sequential routings, are slightly uneven, the somewhat shorter stretches presenting themselves at just those places that most nicely fit the rotational tasks of the hand."

Venus also has phases—currently a waning crescent, to set around the 22nd of March. Can you feel it on the wane?

I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. —Thoreau, Walden

The other night I had a dream, brief and twilight-toned: Stumbling into a darkened room, I felt a feral presence—something lost and creaturely, throbbing with a frightened ferocity. I moved toward its vague shape in the corner, but it was only an empty cardboard box, which I blundered into and demolished. I still felt the presence, which now had shifted to another corner; moving there, I found a thick blanket strangely mounded into a kind of pile or pyramid. I sat down cross-legged and wrapped myself in it.

The distance between ourselves and our losses can be measured in emptiness or intimacy.

That evening, I had rewatched Werner Herzog’s 2004 film The White Diamond, about the trial flights of a small, teardrop-shaped dirigible designed by aeronautical engineer Graham Dorrington to access the rainforest canopy for research and exploration. To test the craft, Dorrington has brought his crew to Kaietur Falls on Guyana’s Potaro River, a seam of froth and thunder splitting the forest. Dorrington is possessed with a wild urge to fly; it thrums him like a restless leg, a caffeine buzz that won’t stop buzzing.

The artist Lena Herzog, the filmmaker’s wife, was present during the filming of The White Diamond, and she marveled at Dorrington’s obsession. “Graham has to fly,” she observed for The Paris Review. “But he also has a scientist’s mind, which gives texture to his fantasies…. collecting life from the jungle’s canopies is not only the airship’s formal purpose—it has now become an integral part of the airship’s engineering. And this all makes Graham’s dreams ever more beautiful.” (The Paris Review piece is paywalled; Herzog shares some of her remarkable photographs of Dorrington’s craft on her web site).

And yet Dorrington’s drive is knottier than this. Like Thoreau-the-traveler, his peregrinations are shot through with loss. A few years before the flights documented in The White Diamond, his friend, the nature filmmaker Dieter Plage, had died when an earlier version of the airship crashed in Sumatra. Throughout the film, we see the physical and psychic effects of Dorrington’s grief go to war with his deep desire to take flight. This febrile enthusiasm possesses him like an allergy to gravity itself; he trembles with it—his face a twist of smile, his eyes rolling skyward, he hops up and down like the very earth nips at his feet. And then he speaks of Dieter and he darkens, crumples, his face hollowing, grieving at his smile.

And all the while, great flocks of white-tipped swifts career back and forth across the falls’ thundering expanse. Herzog’s camera drinks them in as they surge and flash in the sky above. The swifts roost in a great cave behind the falls which, Herzog tells us, has never been entered by humans. In the final shot of the film, we’re looking down the great nape of the falls, into the chasm enfolded in the water’s bright gown, as the swifts fling themselves at full speed into the caves. By the thousands, perhaps the tens of thousands. A river of birds flooding into that insoluble dark. It’s a long shot, braided with composer Ernst Reijseger’s brooding, polyvocal setting of the Kyrie, eleison, and it tears at the heart.

Later, I read that the nests of these swifts (Aeronautes montivagus) have never been described due to the difficulty of reaching their sites on inaccessible cliffs and cave walls.

What does Dorrington’s restless, insurgent grief have to do with Thoreau’s fable? In Bird Relics, her beautiful book about grief in Thoreau’s life and work, Branka Arsić suggests that the fable “depicts a grief intensified by time to the point of obsession, as the mourner identifies his whole life with it”—a mourning which, “far from suspending life into a melancholic stupor, in fact refreshes it, energizing the mourner with strength to keep on traveling.” Along the way, the mourner meets others who have caught a glimpse of the departed creatures, have wondered at them, even loved them. Arsić writes:

In Thoreau’s democratic view … to actually participate in the grief of others—to mourn their losses—is the way to reach them. Thoreau’s wager, supposed to rebuke hopelessness without cheering us into hope, is this: as long as everybody is on the trail, something will be recovered by somebody.

I imagine Thoreau in a democratic airship, lofting along Concord’s byways, hailing passing strangers as he seeks his lost menagerie.

I tripped over Thoreau’s fable while I was trying to learn a little bit more about mourning doves (Zenaida macroura), one of our most common birds, which Americans of Thoreau’s time called “turtle doves.” (The “turtle” comes from turtur, an old Latin onomatopoeia for the cooing calls of doves, which I’m hearing even now). Along the way, I learned that nearly 70 percent of adult mourning doves do not survive the given year. In every moment, these most quotidian of birds navigate a chasm as unfathomable as the caves behind the falls.

But what of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle dove themselves? What do they mean? Elsewhere in Walden, Thoreau warns that “we are in danger of forgetting the language which all things and events speak without metaphor.” Thoreau’s story is no metaphor, I think, but a koan, in which each thing is entirely itself and the face, the presence, that lives in us.

I went looking for a song in this koan. Thoreau’s litany has a rhythm in it—the rhythm of a joke, maybe (a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle dove walk into a bar…); or that of a fable, the shape of a tale that begins familiarly, then opens into mystery. The beginning of a beautiful friendship. These creatures, so close to us, who also reach beyond—into sense, into speed, into flight… but there I go chasing metaphor. Better to turn to the Kyrie, eleison, the prayer that is a koan of petition and praise, that wraps the flight of swifts in its embrace. I’ve included a sketch of the song here, although it’s still got a lot of traveling to do.

What have you lost that you can’t name? “Practice losing farther, losing faster,” writes Elizabeth Bishop. The catalog of the losses we can name is ever expanding: a key, a continent…. And yet there are no disasters! Beyond mastery, Bishop knows, the mystery abides. “As long as everybody is on the trail, something will be recovered by somebody.”

The distance between ourselves and our losses can be measured in emptiness or intimacy.

It’s been a dappled autumn, a strange swirl of bright foliage and summer-warm days, with little of the gray-drawn drear of winter’s doorway in it. And yet, while the numbers on the weather app scramble, the sky still signals the coming winter—reliably, as Orion rears up in the evening dark, and also surprisingly, as the occasional flare of the aurora has played trickster-like across our skies. We’re in a time of disordered signs. But then, the seasons always have interwoven—there’s a bit of spring still at work in fall’s coloring leaves, as they reveal the relict pigments that had protected them when they first broke bud with the increase of light. Just as last spring, I felt autumn’s swoon as the brown-spotted blossoms flew from the magnolias, and winter under a snow of white flowers—

How long would it take
this brave breeze to bury me
in cherry petals?

More recently, on the evening of November 5, I started for home across the landscape through the season’s newfound dark—the fallback hour always a surprise, not only shifting sunrise and sunset, but altering the character of the light at every hour. An evening of unsettling warmth in that wintry light, which as I passed out of the willows and into the maples ripened and softened into a twilight of such sweetness: the moon’s fine smile fogged as if it were breathing on the dome of the sky; a west-going flash of contrail, which spread and evaporated like a ribbon of pigment draped into water. Out on the Arborway, the traffic spasmed; I could feel as much as hear the throb and tumult of the city churning around the station over the hill. I didn’t want to go down into it, and so I paused along the path where the quinces and medlars clasp their wintering fruits against the winds to come. I watched as the troughs of the clouds lifted the going blush of sun, and bats rowed out among the inky crowns of the trees, dipping for insects in eddies of air.

And now, while frost has yet to settle in the night, I see winter not only in the sky, but also in the fringes and pompoms of seeds bobbing at the meadow’s edge—the long, broken wands of goldenrod and the glassine tufts of the asters, all fringed with the seed-fluff that lofts with the winter’s early winds. I’m watching the milkweeds, too—their seed pods burst, their silken linings unraveling, like so many tiny parkas unzipped and blown open by the intrusive wind.

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In his late writings, Henry David Thoreau devoted himself with passionate precision to looking at nature, and the milkweed’s habits entranced him.1 As his illness advanced—he would die from tuberculosis in 1862, in the early darkness of the Civil War—he seemed in a panic to learn “the language of these fields” while he still was able. At the same time, he worried that “in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole.” By 1860, however, Thoreau had begun to reconcile the magnitudes of microscope and heaven’s cope. He finds the early-November goldenrods and asters “richly and exuberantly downy,” their seed “so fine that when we jar the plant and set free a thousand, it is with great difficulty that we detect them in the air.” Here at the edge of visibility, at the threshold of microscope and heaven’s cope, he begins to discover presence and possibility. The seeds of milkweed in particular give him the amplitude he is looking for, as he zooms from the minuscule scale of seed-sails to the landscape mileage the windblown seeds would clock. Thoreau notes how the milkweed’s pods crack open to reveal the seeds with their “thin, silvery parachutes like the finest unsoiled silk,” which soon detach to become “the buoyant balloon which, like some spiders’ webs, bears the seeds to new and distant fields.” To Henry, these seeds are imbued with wanderlust and ambition: a seed hangs on the lip of a recently burst pod like “a vessel moored with long cables and lying in the stream, prepared to spread her sails and depart any moment.” As he sifts the seeds from burst pods along Clematis Brook, he watches as their silk threads “fly apart at once, opening with a spring…

I let one go … I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood….. Feeling the strong north wind, it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction, over Deacon Farrar’s woods, ever rising higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight of it.

To Thoreau, the seed is an emigrant, flying off into the swirling night until the air goes still, until it “descries its promised land and settles gently down between the woods … and its voyage is over.” And yet this is only the beginning of another story, Henry reminds us, as the seed “stoops to rise.” And so it is the plant that journeys far beyond the scope of the moment: “from generation to generation it goes bounding over lakes and woods and mountains. How many myriads go sailing away thus?”

For an author so fixed and studied in a particular place, Thoreau’s disposition toward the end of his life seems to be growing into a metaphysics of dispersal, embracing the risk and uncertainty of dissemination. “We find ourselves in a world that is already planted,” Thoreau observes,” but is also still being planted as at first.”

In the darkness that grows between these plantings, we find our fertility in friends and fellowship. When I shared around some notes about Henry’s faith in a seed, my friend Jennifer Roberts, a great scholar of the arts of seeing, responded with pictures she had made of milkweed down—luminous, fragile, and somehow ferocious. One of these pictures radiantly ravels Henry’s whole story in a single image—the “prismatic tints” dancing along the silks, alive and spectral; the threads burgeoning and ballooning; and beyond, the soft landscape beckoning and enfolding, Henry’s “promised land” of “strange valleys” in whose lees the seed will settle to earth.

Jennifer’s images catch the glimmering presence of the life cycle as it abides in the instant, complete and incompletable. “These silken streamers have been perfecting themselves all summer,” Henry writes, “a prophecy not only of the fall, but of future springs.” A seed, a self—to say there’s no knowing what the future holds is a way of acknowledging the wildness, the vastness, of the present moment. The seeds it keeps, treasured in the soil or hidden in the sky radiant as they ride the winds beyond present sight, even as we know the seed must die into the earth to bring forth its abundance.

Amid the disasters we count and claim, the misfortunes we cast like coins, future flourishings, too, are annealing themselves in the fading light’s alchemy. “What is our labor in November now?” asks the writer Nina MacLaughlin, who is the laureate of this month and its light, and whose work helps to close the pages of this issue. “One job: Pay attention. Pay attention. Pay attention. And every year emerge altered, ready, like lead to gold.” So pause here at the edge of the path while the dusk arranges itself around your shoulders, while the muffled roar steals into your auricles. Touch the seed-frosted goldenrod, watch those seeds swirl in the air to settle and disappear into the tangle. Sift a few milkweed tufts into the wind. Get intimate with the openness of it, with what my friend and Arnoldia contributor Nicholas Anderson calls “the hollowness of this moment” of the seed dispersing. Get in touch with the winter of it, when nothing and everything is happening.

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Yesterday, I had already locked the copy on my column when I came across a lecture by Malcolm Guite, the remarkable poet and Anglican priest with a musical mien and a trickster spirit. Guite’s Christianity is lyrical and intimate; the Trinity in his account is no mystery, but a kind of conversation, and though I am not a practicing Christian, I find his approach to the human predicament compelling. Listening to him, my ears pricked up especially when he came around to the Parable of the Sower, Jesus’s lesson about seeds that fall on rocky ground or good soil; and to John 12:24: Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Henry seems in dialogue with these Gospel strands, I thought, trusting the resilience of seeds, their bravery and inerrancy.

Still pondering the sower and the sown, the seed dying into its abundance, I closed my laptop and reflexively picked up my phone to scan my email: the subject line at the top of the queue was “The Overlooked Lesson of the Parable of the Sower.” The synchronicity ran through me like a shock—I actually tossed the phone across the sofa in alarm.

It turned out to be the headline of another resonant post from Alexis Madrigal, whose newsletter, Oakland Garden Club, is energizing and essential. Alexis was writing here about the Octavia Butler novel, but this only thickens the resonance—especially in this moment, when Butler’s fierce vision feels especially relevant.

“What is the point of talking about botanical beauty or mystery in times like these?” Alexis begins.2 “Who could be thinking about flowers at a moment like this?” He turns to Butler and her protagonist, Olamina, with her message of human destiny in the stars. Alexis acknowledges the challenge, the trouble, with this vision of space colonization. It’s vision, though—the dream, the long-arc commitment, Alexis suggests, that is the overlooked lesson in Butler’s work. Vision is what we need; vision is what prepares the soil to receive the seed. Not only something to walk away from; something to walk toward. “Does the specific dream matter?” Alexis asks. “I’m not sure it does. And I would suggest a journey inwards into life, rather than outwards into space.” He gives further shape to this prophetic possibility, suggesting we look for it in our distinctive human role as “the life that knows all other life.”

I’m with Alexis here: I stand for the journey inwards into life.3 We could do worse than to begin with Thoreau, and with the seed that dies into the earth to bring forth its abundance.

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Recently, we found a free chamber-music concert in a local church. Arriving late, the trio already bent to their first piece, we quickly settled into the back pew. In the brief intermission that followed, we moved to the middle pews and waited for the next piece, the A-minor clarinet trio by Johannes Brahms. The players returned to the sanctuary to warm applause and took their seats; their smiles ripened into openness, their bodies tensed for the strike of the music. The cello broke the silence with a line that lifted and fell, at once poised and somehow confessional, confiding; the clarinet picked up the glimmering shape of the phrase and lifted it gently toward the rafters. The piano introduced a shadow-dapple, a skeining shimmer of notes, the volume glittered into a fulsome, generous tumult of musical discourse, and then it was revealed: a clearing where great, gossamer beings conversed, lofting together some remembered song in emergent, phenomenal concord, raveling a constitution beyond rehearsal or notation.

The music draped me in its lively gravity; it clung to me; it invited me to expand to the mullioned windows, to fill the gothic vaults with my own electrified perception. There weren’t ears for this; this was a matter for the body, for the whole self gone porous and constellated. I gripped my chin, rocked toward the edge of the pew; it felt like receiving a tumbling-forth of remarkable news, the issuance of some vital instructions. This presence hadn’t shown itself in the first piece, and as the next three movements of the Brahms trio unfolded, it fell away as if absorbed back into the shadowed quiets of the hall.

I sometimes feel a piece of music as a sort of interdimensional being, multivariate and vast, which we coax into passage through our own space and time. Like the perfect solids that wander through Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, only their shadows and outlines appear here, outlines that unfold in time, but have some crystalline co-presence that burgeons beyond our stricture. Here, it seemed as though they (and the players, their kindred avatars) had pulled us up into their spacious realm, outdoors of time and breath. The music both swept along and stood there, like a standing wave, the kind you find sometimes at the narrowing of a channel, the delta of an enlivened sea, roil-shouldered and impossible in its mobility. The music doing with the world what that water does with light.

Afterward, I browsed what recordings of the Brahms trio I could find available for streaming. They were beautiful. But the uncanny quality those players awoke in the sanctuary, the bounty of the dreaming world, was nowhere to be found.

Sing yourself to where the singing comes from—Seamus Heaney’s invitation, in the poem “At the Wellhead,” as he hears in his wife’s beloved voice the recollected music of an erstwhile neighbor, a pianist. As the notes had poured from her window, Heaney writes, they came out to us like hoisted water/raveling off a bucket at the wellhead. The wellhead: what I see here is not some fey, glimmering pool in an old tale, but a workaday bucket brought up from the mossy bottom. And yet there it is, or was: the source of all music. Right there, just then, just now, in the raveling of this water.

Roving through my browser tabs recently, I ran across the word Seiche. It’s a beautiful word, I think, a glamorous word, though I only dimly knew it had something to do with the tides. So I looked it up on Wikipedia; the entry had a metaphysical cast to it:

A seiche (/seɪʃ/ SAYSH) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors, caves, and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.

Seiches are often imperceptible to the naked eye, and observers in boats on the surface may not notice that a seiche is occurring due to the extremely long periods.

The effect is caused by resonances in a body of water that has been disturbed by one or more factors, most often meteorological effects (wind and atmospheric pressure variations), seismic activity, or tsunamis. Gravity always seeks to restore the horizontal surface of a body of liquid water...

Seiche-related phenomena. It’s pretty anodyne, I realize now—like those streaming recordings of the Brahms trio, the chart (but only the chart) of something once brazen and sparkling, now annealed, normalized, in its passage through Flatland. But at first reading, I’d heard a song in it, and I found the song, or a glimmer of it. I tried to catch it in the recording I’m sharing here.

Is it alive? When it comes to my own singing, I can’t tell. All I know is that the place where singing comes from was for that moment a liquid place. But it’s moved; it’s moving now.

  That country crossed was what I could imagine,
and that little spit of answer is the shadow—
not the ocean which casts it—      that I step next
into       to be cleansed of question.

—Ed Roberson, “As at the Far Edge of Circling”

This is my column for the fall 2024 issue of Arnoldia, a quarterly magazine about the nature of trees, which I edit at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. The piece has its roots in an audio post I shared here a couple of years ago. The print issue of Arnoldia hits the mail next week.

A few years ago, September brought a hurricane that broke apart along the whole of the east coast. As the first fronds of the storm stole inland, I lay awake in the early hours and listened to the rain sluicing down the shingles, funneling through foliage, puttering on the paving stones. There is a quiet and accessible doorway to utopia in this: all of us breathing in the dark, lying still, a vast alone-togetherness beneath the weather’s comprehensive intimacies. And then I thought of the leaves in the rain, each one alive and on the brink of a fall.

Earlier that summer, we had decided to put up a shed in our backyard. It came in a kit, all the pieces precut. It was supposed to look like a log house with a slant roof in lean-to style. The wood arrived untreated, and the manufacturer recommended staining it right away to keep the wood from weathering. The rain came a few days into the project, with the doors not yet hung, the shingles still waiting to be put on the roof.

The sky brightened but the rain increased, clattering down like showers of coins through the high trees. I got out of bed to see what I could do about the unfinished shed. Halfway down the stairs, I stopped at the window looking out on our tiny side yard, where a volunteer redbud had grown into a sprightly tree fifteen, maybe twenty feet tall. I’ve spent a lot of time under this tree, which partly shades a hammock on the patio. On a sunny day with the canopy tiling overhead, the shadows of higher leaves project on the lower ones, making silhouettes of leaves within leaves, a dappling dance of emptiness and form. And the leaves themselves luminous, strobing, elementally green. How much light, this marvelous green light of earth, the leaves let pass! Of course, these are the wavelengths they don’t use in photosynthesis. Still, whenever this leafy light is upon me, whether swinging in a hammock or walking through the landscape, it strikes me as a boon I’ve done nothing to earn, and never could refuse—which is to say, a kind of gift.

So it was September, and I was standing on the stairs now looking down on the leaves, and the rain was falling, and I noticed how all the leaves were cupped: the heart-shaped, entire blade of each leaf had tensed upward and inward, like when you put your hands together to catch water from a faucet, with the midrib where your pinkies touch. And here’s the thing: they weren’t wet. It was raining, raining hard, but the leaf surfaces were neatly beading the water. A leaf would bounce when the water hit it, and the water would settle into a gelid bead of glassy reflections, plumply poised on the leaf’s dry palm. As rain continued to fall, the droplets would multiply, coming together in an instant, blip, doubling up and doubling up and doubling up, until a single bead of water grew heavy enough, and the cupped hands of the leaf would dip, and the water would roll off like a marble; and through all this juggling of water, the leaves, like the hands of a magician, remained visibly dry.

I asked my colleague Michael Dosmann about this trick of botanical hydrophobia; he told me that it’s called the “lotus effect,” explaining that at nanoscopic scales a leaf’s cuticle is studded with waxy asperities, microcrystalline projections, which can repel water and prevent it from wetting the leaf surface. Surprisingly, it’s the roughness of this micro-topography that lets the droplets roll so smoothly, as it provides little purchase for the water to adhere. Picking up particles of dirt, the rolling waterdrops clean the leaf surface, and perhaps help to flush away pathogens, too, in a process called “self-cleaning.” It seems fair to ask, though, who is cleaning whom?

Since the mid-twentieth century, the self-cleaning efficacy of the lotus effect has inspired materials scientists to develop industrial and commercial applications, resulting in a dizzying variety of paints, coatings, films, fabrics, and laser-sculpted metallic nano-surfaces. (Not all these gifts of biomimicry are benign; the formulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS or “forevever chemicals” now linked to a variety of ailments, also was inspired by the lotus effect; of course, we can’t blame this poisonous gift on the leaves.) But the salience of the phenomenon is ancient: in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna advises Arjuna that “one who performs his duty without attachment… is unaffected by sinful action, as the lotus leaf is untouched by water.”

In that September rain, I wasn’t thinking about nanotechnology, or trichomes, or alkyl chains. I watched the leaves receiving the rain, rolling it into drops, and bowing, bowing here and there as they shed these gifts to fall. I thought of the prayerful hand posture practiced in many yogic and Buddhist traditions, the Anjali mudra, hands held together, fingertips to fingertips, palms gently cupped. Anjali: “divine offering” in Sanskrit. And I remembered how the late scholar Helen Vendler, who spent childhood days adventuring in the Arboretum, caught in her study of his Sonnets the way Shakespeare sometimes conjugates the verb “to love”: loving, leaving, leafless. Vendler calls this Shakespeare’s “law of nourishment and consumption.”

I stayed on the stairs for some while with the leaves dipping and bowing, the loving water leaving the soon-to-be-leafless tree. And then the spell broke, and I ran outside to throw a tarp over the unfinished shed.

I am writing this now in another rainstorm, sitting on the porch next to the redbud tree, watching the rain bead and fall from the leaves. Rainfall and the song of crickets, that autumnal counterpoint. The leaves are not the same old leaves, of course, though as the season advances, neither are they new. Again, the gemlike water beads, conjoins, and slides away. Each leaf is mapped with its own constellation of droplets, more numerous than I remember, though I’m sure these leaves know better than I how many droplets their offering takes.

The shed has withstood many rains, and with many more to come, already it’s streaked with the lacings of fungal growth. Years or decades from now, someone else likely will see it as a trouble to take down. Performing their duties without attachment, the leaves soon will fall, and then new leaves will come, resilient and ephemeral, to renew their gifts. I want to learn from the leaves.

I’m excited to share the fall issue of Arnoldia, which includes a mind-opening visit to the site of an Aztec botanical garden, bracing accounts of the deep and troubled histories of landscapes in the UK and the American South, and a feature from the visual artist Kyle Browne cataloging her landscape-based, tree-entangled work. To subscribe, join the Arnold Arboretum, and we’ll send you the issue today.

“I’ve mentioned this before, the way certain landscapes seem to enhance certain wisdom texts, like reading Lao Tzu in a temperate rainforest is just a great read: there’s so much kind of moisture and water imagery and the valley spirit and all these things in Lao Tzu.” Novelist David James Duncan in conversation with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee of Emergence. They speak chiefly of Duncan’s recent novel Sun House, which has been hanging out mid-pile on my night table for a few months; this interview has got me pulling it to the top. (It also makes me want to find a wisdom text and a landscape and put them together, soonest.)

I’ve been entranced by the ungainly grace of this performance by the collective Men! Dancing!, set to a haunting choral arrangement of Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar.” The music is derived from Massachusetts-based singer-songwriter Rani Arbo’s rich setting. The latter, along with this version of Jason Molina’s “Whip Poor Will” from the album Magnolia Electric Company, have been on close-cycling repeat for me the last couple of weeks; they go together like goldenrod and aster.

“Every single day since I was born the sun has been there,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, in Autumn, “but somehow I’ve never quite got used to it, perhaps because it is so unlike everything else that we know.” I had opened the book after unfurling a picnic blanket and settling into a camp chair on the north shore of Crystal Lake in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, from which we would witness the 2024 eclipse. With absurd auspiciousness, the pages had fallen open to a chapter entitled “The Sun,” in which Knausgaard complains about the sun’s implacable reign over our days. “That we cannot even look directly at the sun without being blinded or having our eyesight permanently damaged sometimes feels like an unreasonable restriction,” he writes, “even an insult.” And it occurred to me that today was different—today, our dispensation had come. 

Not everyone greets this advent with a carnivalesque spirit. A relative Whats-apped from her ashram in the south of India to caution against even venturing outdoors on the day of the eclipse, and she invoked the baleful presence of Rahu, the demon in the Mahabharata who eats the sun. How strangely complacent our tribe here seemed, by contrast, as we milled in the state park between the last snows soaking to mud and the far scrim of ice graying down the lake; as we stumbled and splashed over the sodden earth, fiddled with our paper eclipse glasses, and looked to the sky.

Many have pointed out how strange a conjunction the solar eclipse is, its many complications resolving to one mind-boggling condition: that the sun and the moon, so disparate in diameter and distance from the earth, coincide in apparent size from our earthly perspective. The data used to track and predict such conjunctions are called ephemerides. They are woven from a wild, unwieldy skein of orbital dynamics: the monthly cycles of the moon’s phases; the passage of the tilted lunar orbit through the plane of the ecliptic; and the moon’s relative advance and retreat, with consequent changes in apparent size, as it traces its orbital ellipse around the earth. Among the first chroniclers of the ephemerides were the Babylonian court astronomers who clocked the skies for nervous kings; today, it’s done by organizations like the Solar-System Dynamics Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who track not only sun and moon, but eight planets, 293 planetary satellites, 3,933 comets and cometary fragments, and 1,356,131 asteroids—this last number including Pluto with its demotion to “dwarf planet,” though its moons still are counted in the “planetary satellites” number above. I take delight in the bureaucratic fussiness of this list, the work product of a government office whose job it is to track the movement of heavenly bodies, a kind of ministry of magic.

Ephemerides is a beautiful word with a meaning that’s, well, quotidian—roughly, it means “daily things.” We use the word ephemera for the transients of our days: mayflies and moths, calling cards, snapchats, bluejay feathers, waves, dewy spiderwebs, ice cream cones, a sudden hot flush of the cheeks, Cecilia Bartoli's long f-sharp in the aria “Son qual nave ch'agitata,” a breeching whale, a backward glance, windshield frost, sandcastles, the head on your beer, ticket stubs, matchbooks, echoes, rainbows, reflections in mirrors, candles, certain flowers. That some of these things are also called memorabilia underlines the strange way that memory and transience are linked and kindred powers. The sun lives six thousand days, the moon dies every month; everything remembers and everything changes; meaning comes in conjunction. 

By midafternoon on Crystal Lake, some hundreds of people had gathered in the last of the snow, and as the light softened and fermented, the chatter and splash of the crowd softened, too, emulsifying to a hum, a murmur of collective attention. The last lozenge of the sun’s disk dissolving, dissolving—and the moment totality hits, into the giddiness and swoon a freight train comes chugging along the lake, the engine driver hits the horn, and the crowd lets out an exaltation, an earthy, guttural yawp. We breathe and blink in the strange light beneath the streaming corona. There is no name for it.

I was about to say that nothing prepares you for this sight; not even previously having seen totality is enough to stanch the juice and swoon of the moment, the giddy vertiginous laughter, the whelm of being pressed close to something at once intimate and incredibly vast. But I don't think this is so. For being of the earth, being earthling, is preparation enough. And the swoon, the exaltation, is the fitting response—oh, but it’s more than “response,” it’s integral, as much eclipse as the streaming corona and the beads of light crystalizing out of lunar canyons. Eclipse of the quotidian and all its sublunary habits. I wonder if totality is an actual psychedelic experience—does it tickle the endocannabinoid system, trigger some of the same chemical cascade as psilocybin? I don’t mean this in a reductive way; for the moment, we are organisimically in touch with earthly being. Beyond Vishnu and demon, the eclipse is an aspect of the three-body problem that gives forth everything that matters to us. The overwhelm is what we do, we earthlings, we ephemera. 

This video from the Exploratorium explains the Saros cycle, the long-running texture of orbital complexities in which we and the solar eclipses are woven.

About a dozen miles east of Swindon in the south of England, there is a horse on a hill—a horse cut into the turf and filled with chalk, its striking outlines measuring roughly one hundred meters from head to tail, making an equine flourish on the brow of the Berkshire Downs just visible from the Great Western Railway. 

My own memory of the White Horse is a scattered thing—a fragile crossing of maps and notes, scents and bodily sensations. I find its traces too in the Scheduled Monuments Listing for Historic Britain, in Google Earth and online maps, and in the various articles, contemporary and historic, that tell the story of the Horse or pry open its origin. I find it also in the recollected sound of mockingbird and starling and robin, in the weft of the wind passing over the wheat fields, and the child-chant, up to the blood! up to the blood! rising from a gaggle of red-shirted kindergarteners atop Dragon Hill; in the afterburn eyespots of mulberry blossoms overhanging the Ridgeway; in the tufts of grass-entangled sheep's wool trailing in the wind. 

The Horse seems to be some three thousand years old, originating in the Late Bronze Age—long before the arrival of Roman, Saxon, Norman, and Dane. Since the form of the Horse first was cut into the soil, this landscape has faced a bewildering enjambment of transformations: the advent of agriculture and the arrival of domesticated animals, the coming of Roman rule, the migration of settled populations from fortified hill sites to valley hamlets and farms, the emergence of feudal land use, and subsequent transformation of the landscape by early-modern enclosure into a sheep-dotted pastoral realm. Empires rise and fall, and the Horse endures.

In a 1999 article in the journal Representations, Philip Schwyzer gathers the theories of the Horse’s origin: in the eleventh century, chroniclers deemed it a marvel and wonder of nature; early-modern antiquaries attributed it to the Wessex King Alfred and his brother Æthelred, who had it made to commemorate of their defeat of the Danes at Ashdown in 871; and popular lore held that the Horse represented the steed of St. George, who spilled the great serpent’s blood on Dragon Hill, a flat-topped hillock that stands like an altar before the soaring, arched choir loft of the White Horse.

Across these tellings, the Horse has endured, not by some magic or cunning trick of its fabrication, but through the attention and care of those who live nearby. Today, the "scouring of the Horse" is a bank-holiday gathering for volunteers; every few years for these many centuries, people have gathered to weed the chalk beds and pound them into compact brightness (for readers who will be in the UK this summer, National Trails will hold scouring sessions in July and August). Schwyzer inventories some of the Horse's many attendants:

At some point it passed into the curatorship of the people known to Caesar as the Atrebates, and from them to the Romano-Britons who buried their dead in the long oval mound to the east of the White Horse. The scourings continued after the Romans withdrew, and the responsibility fell to Saxon settlers who may well have recognized in the Horse a comfortingly familiar religious symbol. The meaning of the Horse to the Christian denizens of Wessex who scoured it in later generations must have been a different matter, and so it has been for all the various forms and fashions of “Englishmen” who have inhabited the region since. 

For the most recent inhabitants of these lands, the Uffington White Horse is often described as “enigmatic.” In 2003, the Guardian journalist Mark Townsend called the Horse “a masterpiece of minimalist art” with a mysterious past, observing that “(n)obody knows why the Bronze Age people dug trenches nearly 3 ft deep and filled them with virgin chalk to create an immense image that can only be seen properly from the air.” Townsend’s nobody-knows-why trope feels shopworn and obligatory; like other such figures—the Nazca Lines of Chile's Atacama Desert; Ohio’s Serpent Mound—the White Horse is largely interpreted as a landscape feature designed for the bird’s eye view. This is the first picture you see of the Horse if you look it up online or search for it on Google Earth. And seen from the sky, the figure is a great puzzle. Its makers could not have experienced it as we do, we who come from above. What message were they hoping to convey, and to whom? What made them conceive such a work on such a scale? What were they trying to tell us?

These are modern questions, peering back down the ages, much as the aerial view comprehends the site from above. It’s not that they aren’t compelling—at the rough time of its making, horses were new to the inhabitants of Britain; it’s hard not to wonder how they who made the Horse saw this creature and their relation to it. But the question is distancing. What if we come to the Horse as its creators must have done—over the landscape, step by step?

I come to the Horse over the Ridgeway, the ancient walking path that runs east-west 87 miles over the Wessex Downs. This path here is accessible from the village of Ashbury, reached from Swindon via the no. 47 West Berkshire Council bus, which climbs the dipping, hedge-hemmed lanes of Bishopstone and Hinton Parva before making a stop at the Rose & Crown Pub in Ashbury; disembarking here, one walks north on the Ashbury Hill Road, which rises through past field and glade to the Ridgeway a little more than a mile from the village center.

Already some two thousand years old by the time the Horse was made, the Ridgeway follows the spine of the chalk escarpment that underlies much of the Wessex region—and is kin to a whole complex of chalk formations, including the South Downs and the chalk caves of Champagne region across the Channel, all of which were laid down during the Cretaceous, when much of northern Europe was covered by shallow seas. The chalk can be hundreds of meters deep; along the ridge of the downs, it rises to the surface, its whiteness is apparent where it lies compounded with surface soils. In the view below, White Horse Hill is the folded ridge on the horizon at center left, the Ridgeway coursing brightly, dipping and winking as it wends toward the Hill, its weedy verge giving way to patterned fields, some still awaiting planting.

The Ridgeway itself is broad and flat, a rough terrazzo of chalk, soil, and compacted turf, scored in places by the imprint of horseshoes. Several times between Ashbury Hill Road and the top of the Down, it is intersected by "restricted byways"—rutted jeep trails, which give access to the farm fields along the route, most of which, in late May, are dressed in the stiff green of spring wheat. Who owns this land? I wonder; I know just enough about land tenancy and the history of enclosure to make my speculations dangerous. The person driving the tractor coursing the far edge of the field to the south—is he a tenant or an owner; does he live on the down or below in the village? Whose sheep graze on White Horse Hill; who keeps up the fences?

Other ancient sites dot the Ridgeway, including Wayland’s Smithy, a neolithic long barrow already ancient when the Horse was cut, and Uffington Castle, a hill fort likely inhabited by its makers and tenders.

The horse itself is not visible from this approach, although signage points the way, prompting the walker to depart from the Ridgeway and strike out over pastures, taking care to observe niceties. I climb a stile to cross the fence, nearby is a sign announcing the heritage status of White Horse Hill. It’s striking that the largest type on the sign is devoted to the topic of sheep.

From the fence, cropped grass sweeps up and away, dotted with sheep turd and yellow hawkbit blooms that bound in the breeze. Shreds of wool trace the line of the wind, too, where they catch here and there in the turf. 

The presence of sheep—how they transform the landscape, and how access to land was changed for them—pattern and haunt the Vale of the White Horse.

Here, from the brow of White Horse Hill, the landscape’s pastoral character is very much in evidence. We're looking down into a feature called “The Manger,” which has the shape of a glacial cirque. 

The elevation of the landscape here is hard to gauge, but the drop is precipitous. (In my photo, sheep are visible down there, filing along a path of their own, but they’re hard to spot in this view.) With the Manger and its other cusps and folds, the Hill juts like a molar tooth from the vast jaw of the Ridgeway. To the north of this deep-sculpted glacial declivity, the landscape rolls off into fields, pastures, hamlets. We’re looking northwest here; the Great Western Railway, running horizontally with the band of trees from east to west, lies roughly halfway to the windmills some four miles away.

It’s from this spot, turning to the right, that one gains a first glimpse of the Horse, by turning from northwest to northeast. And a glimpse is all one gets—or rather, a glimpse here, another there, the Horse revealing now a forelock, now a beaked snout—the whole a thing of shreds and patches, markedly different from the aerial overview by which the Horse is best known. 

Indeed, the Horse up close is shy, skittish, its white members flashing in and out of view among the folds of its deeply-contoured bed. In the land, there is a remarkable sense of bodily form; toiling up and across the lifting hill, one is intimately juddered and bumped by equine contours. I find myself wondering if the ones who made the Horse were guided and inspired not by some abstract ideal, but by this vast body already present in the land. Maybe the medieval commentators had it right: before there was a horse, the Horse was here.

Gazing on this landscape, coaxing the imagination to source stirrings of bronze-age meaning-making on the land, I’m also gazing on the history of enclosure, the transformation into private pastureland of commons long devoted to shared grazing, farming, and foraging. The grassy down, the flocking sheep, exert a powerful influence; gazing on grazing, it's easy to miss the register of change in the turf-softened folds of the land. How did the landscape of the Horse read in the Bronze age, before the sheep came to graze here? What forms of land use prevailed when the hill fort throve; when the land first was farmed under open-field practices; when the Romans left; before the imposition of the scheduled-monuments program with its signage, parking lots, and websites? Whose memory is the Horse?

Perhaps we should instead ask, how are we the horse’s memory? The Horse is a standing wave of attention and care, which belongs to all of its times. To covet its lost originary meaning is to miss something crucial about its persistence in the land, and in us. Children run to the summit of Dragon Hill, crying up to the blood! up to the blood! Families and neighbors kneel in the grass to pull the tough stalks of hawkbit that encroach on the chalk, to pound dusky shards to white powder. Over the hills, clouds are ever gathering, but we have the chalk and the hill and the great body of the Horse, its glamor, its embrace. Now as in the time of its making, its meaning is this treasury of shared attention, experience, and care.

The morning of her operation, my wife Rebekah decided that she wanted to bicycle to Faulkner Hospital, which stands little more than a mile from our neighborhood across the Arboretum. And so we packed up her overnight things and pedaled off toward Faulkner: through Bussey Brook Meadow, where frost whitened the relic reeds and the boles of Ailanthus1 creaked bonily in the breeze; onward up Valley Road, huffing and pedal-mashing past the magnolias still bare of their big leaves; and out through the Centre Street Gate, toward whatever was to come.

Ever since, passing this way triggers a welling of memory—my fear, her grit, and the shadowing trees. It seemed at the time as though cancer had declared war on our family: in quick succession, Rebekah, her sister, and my father were struck with diagnoses. Only Rebekah survived; she’s now fifteen years free of recurrence. I won’t say the trees made the difference, though I wouldn’t have wanted to face any of it without them.

After a recent surgery of my own, a morning walk in the Arboretum became my post-operative routine. The conifer collection was my special balm; as the days warmed and my stamina increased, I sought the secret chambers of the yews and the touch of the giant sequoia’s softly resonant bark. I wandered among the spruces crowded with new cones, releasing their pollen in cloudy sheets that sieved the sunlight as they drifted downslope. These gymnosperms, great survivors of life’s tumbling epochs, treasure hope and healing in their everlasting green. This medicine isn’t metaphorical: the air amid trees is vibrant with enlivened chemistry; their pigments tickle deep-rooted centers of neural appeasement; their fallen needles cushion every recuperative step. It’s a fast-acting pharmacopeia, with no unwanted side effects. I don’t believe it’s possible to overdose.

Since those convalescent days I have treasured my walk to work, incorporating encounters with the collection into my commute. A long-dormant case of sciatica recurred over the summer, however, taking away my walk with its wild, thickening pain. I tried describing it to a nurse who was contemplating a list of keywords: “it feels like I have an arrow buried in my back,” I said—“okay, that’s Stabbing,” she replied—“and there’s like a bare wire running down my leg”—“that would be Shooting,” she continued. “Shooting and stabbing?” I repeated. “I’m a crime scene!”

Keywords missing from the nurse’s form: Instability. Fragility. Hollowness. Uncertainty. Words for the psychic impact of pain, its cosmic extent—the way it narrows your mind, crowding out the questions that usually enliven you. Standing and walking brings out the worst of my pain, but sitting appeases it. This relief carries over into cycling, and so I’ve taken to biking again, a gift of miraculous, swift, pain-soothing mobility.

Yesterday, I set out on my bicycle for the oak collection. With a kindling curiosity about the history of Oklahoma’s oilfields2, I was looking for specimens of blackjack oak, Quercus marilandica, a scrub oak found across the southeastern quarter of North America. Along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, it comes together with post oak and a wild variety of shrubs and other plants to form the “Cross Timbers,” a savanna ecosystem of great age and complexity interlacing the oilfields.

Heading out from Hunnewell3 along Meadow Road, I pedaled through the invisible patisserie of the katsuras still pumping out their caramel fragrance; turning at the ponds, I climbed Bussey Hill Road past the lemon-lime foliage of the redbuds, under towering sassafras trees with mitten-shaped leaves, and turned down Valley Road past the bitternut afire with fall to its topmost height. Here I slowed, scanning for the particular blackjack specimens I sought.

The plant-record database lists twelve living trees distributed around the landscape, including one on Peters Hill that was accessioned in 1895. The specimens I sought in the oaks collection are younger, collected from the wild in 2018 by Tiffany Enzenbacher and Kea Woodruff during a collecting trip to Cross Timbers country near Tishomingo, Oklahoma. They’re saplings, only recently planted out, and still surrounded by protective cages of wire. Q. marilandica is sometimes called duck-foot oak, and I delighted at the comical webby footprint of the saplings’ still-green leaves, with which my imagination paddled off uncertainly toward the Great Plains.

And my pain? It hadn’t disappeared, but for a moment it felt right-sized on that vaster map. The analgesic effect of trees is compounded not only of chemistry, but curiosity.

Earlier, I said that it felt like cancer had declared war on my family. The metaphor feels fraught now, with the enormity of the war on Gaza growing daily. Recently, I received a pitch for an article from a young journalist proposing to write about West-Bank olive groves and the Palestinian farmers who tend them. I replied to his email, suggesting a January deadline. The day was Friday, October 6. A couple of days later, with the horrors of that weekend still emerging, he wrote again, asking for reprieve from the January deadline, with the hope that peace would come and he could return to the olive groves. I begged him to be safe. As I write this morning I see his byline from Tel Aviv, where he is covering the war.

Is there no balm in Gilead? the prophet cries in Jeremiah. Is there no physician there? Scholars believe the biblical balm was Storax, which Wikipedia describes as “a natural resin isolated from the wounded bark” of sweetgums. As for Gilead, it was a land that lay close by the River Jordan. We live in a world of wounds—and we share it with trees.

I expect the story of the olive groves will have changed by the time peace comes and the next normal is found (may it be soon). The malignancies of hate and fear, of war and unspeakable grief—I know that trees can’t take these away. I also know that there is no peace without them. Some of the West Bank olive trees are five hundred years old, after all. Think of all that those trees—and their caretakers in hope and in grief—have witnessed and withstood.

I’m excited to share the winter issue of Arnoldia, which includes a remarkable, Sebaldian essay about a lost New York tree by Benjamin Swett and deeply thoughtful reporting on the science of forest pathogens in the Anthropocene by Anelise Chen—not to mention smashing cover photography by the amazing art historian and philosopher of the eye Jennifer Roberts. To subscribe, join the Arnold Arboretum, and we’ll send you the issue today.

“His trained eye spied wandering gutters in the stone…. He traced eleven of the lines to a single point and then realized what they showed: the roots of an ancient and very large tree, at a time when forests were still new in the world.” A fossil forest found in the Catskills near Cairo, New York, dates back some 400 million years to the Middle Devonian.

“Unlike the other geologic intervals whose beginnings—and endings—are well defined, we don’t know how the narrative of the Anthropocene will turn out…. We still have time to choose which story we wish to tell.” Geologist Marcia Bjonerud, in “Ironies of the Anthropocene.” (In Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds), Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/an7c-9w79.)

“If recollecting were forgetting,” Emily Dickinson writes cryptically, “Then I remember not.” I was surprised to discover that, though many butterflies flit through her verse, she never invokes the monarch by name. Does her work remember the monarch, somehow, as it flit through her blooming garden? When she observes a “butterfly’s assumption gown, / In chrysoprase apartments hung,” I suspect it’s a monarch chrysalis she is spying: chrysoprase, a semi-precious variety of chalcedony, shares the cocoon’s jade hue. Emily’s butterfly emerges from this opalescent cocoon not as a doughty migrant, but casually, a debutante “condescending to descend, / And be of buttercups the friend.” Of the migratory habit that we associate with the monarch today, she has nothing to say.

To be fair, the monarch failed to catch the attention of most nineteenth-century observers. Henry David Thoreau never mentions monarchs in Walden, I think, and only occasionally takes note of them in the Journal. He has much to say about memory, however, if by memory we mean the treasury of the human past: custom, habit, history. The past cannot be presented, early Thoreau claims: memory is imaginary, and history irretrievable. Throughout his early Journal, he distrusts memory, complaining of “the treachery of memory and the manifold accidents to which tradition is liable,” and avers that “I read history as little critically as I consider the landscape, and am more interested in the atmospheric tints and various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create than in its groundwork and composition.”

Memory is less successful as project, Thoreau seems to be saying, than as phenomenon. “With how little cooperation of the societies, after all, is the past remembered!” Nature and time keep traces; “the monument of death will outlast the memory of the dead.” He continues:

The Pyramids do not tell the tale confided to them. The living fact commemorates itself.… Critical acumen is exerted in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented; we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not what was, but what is…. We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that they are bones?

This last observation fascinates me: Nature remembers that they are bones. The past is present: the thick irreducibility of the now in all its insistent, moldy specificity. With Emerson, Thoreau prefers the empirical to the memorial, and the autobiographical to the biographical. History, he complains, “is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the back side of the picture on the wall, as if the author expected the dead would be his readers.” And yet here, he notes that the empirical, the phenomenal, the co-arising unfolding vital stuff of the natural world, is already mnemonic in character: the world remembering to be a world.

In that vast organ of collective memory known as the Linnaean taxonomy, the monarch butterfly takes the name Danaus plexippus. It was Linnaeus himself, in 1758, who bestowed the epithet plexippus—derived from the Greek, for “horse driver,” a seeming echo of the monarch's traveling ways. Danaus, eponym of the genus, was a mythical son of the king of Egypt, whom legend credits with building the first ship in order to flee with his daughters, escaping over the Ionian Sea to the Peloponnese to avoid their forced marriage. 

We can’t know how much of this story ever passed for fact, nor how it passed into legend (myth, though mnemonic, battens itself on forgetting). In his Natural History, Pliny suggests that Danaus made his voyage in the year known to us as 1485 BC—by which time ships of all sizes were already known in Egypt. The import of the tale is clear, however: Danaus was willing to go to the greatest lengths, inventive lengths, indeed to wander, in furthering the interests of his children. Kinship was a key part of the myth: Homer calls his wandering Greeks Danaans to signify their descent from this founding navigator. 

The Danaus myth tells of recklessness, of pioneering (or invasion)—and of beauty, as Homer’s preening Danaans suggest. But this was not what nineteenth-century scientists called the monarch, whose famous migration was not yet known. The genus name for the monarch then was Anosia—an epithet of Aphrodite, which signifies “unholy”—wanton, lascivious, all the excesses of beauty. To my ear, it also seems kin to “agnosia,” which means not to know, or to forget.

While Thoreau had little to say about the monarch, he doted on milkweed. In a late essay called “Dispersal of Seeds,” he considers milkweed down, the wind-loving silken threads by which its seeds sail forth in the fall—“finer and fairer than that of thistle,” he notes, reporting that the poor collect it to fill their beds. With a parachutist’s alacrity, the plant packs this finery into the “faery-like casket(s) ” of its seed pods; split open, these pods reveal “unsoiled silk closely compressed,” the seeds “arranged in an imbricated manner”—some two hundred seeds “in a little oblong chest armed with soft, downy prickles.” The insides of these dehiscent vessels shine with pearly profligacy, baring opalescent threads that crowd forth from the open pod. A careful observer, Thoreau notes that these silks begin as “conduit(s) for nutriments” for each seed; when ripe, the strands detach, and become “the buoyant balloon which, like some spiders’ webs, bears the seeds to new and distant fields.”

To Henry, these seeds are imbued with wanderlust and ambition: a seed hangs by its flocking on the lip of a recently burst pod like “a vessel moored with long cables and lying in the stream, prepared to spread her sails and depart any moment.” Sifting seeds from burst pods, he watches as the silk threads “fly apart at once, opening with a spring—and then ray their relics out into a hemispherical form, each thread freeing itself from its neighbor, and all reflecting prismatic tints…"

I let one go… I fear it will make shipwreck against the neighboring wood….. Feeling the strong north wind, it is borne off rapidly in the opposite direction, over Deacon Farrar’s woods, ever rising higher and higher, and tossing and heaved about with every fluctuation of the air, till at fifty rods off and one hundred feet above the earth, steering south—I lose sight of it.

To Thoreau, the plant is a pioneer, a migrant in full, flying off into the swirling night until the moist air goes still, whereupon the seed “descries its promised land and settles gently down between the woods… and its voyage is over.” And yet the end of this eolian voyage is the beginning of another story, whence a new plant will spring; thus the seed “stoops to rise,” Henry reminds. “From generation to generation it goes bounding over lakes and woods and mountains. How many myriads go sailing away thus…? At any rate, I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth.”

Through the nineteenth century, the monarch’s annual disappearance remained a mystery, and Thoreau didn’t know that monarchs follow the north-rolling emergence of the milkweeds up and down their vast meadowland empire. But he realized something we have forgotten: that milkweed too is a wanderer, whose mobile habits set the great migration’s course and extent. The adult monarch remembers the milkweed that sustained them as caterpillars—a discrete, individual memory that uncannily survives the storm of metamorphosis. This memory, for northbound migratory monarchs, becomes the chief navigational directive. So milkweed is memory, as the vast tribe of Asclepias plants, emerging and blooming northward with the tide of Spring, remind hungry monarchs northward with their freshening abundance.

For Thoreau, the intergenerational generosity of plants suggests an ethical standard: “He who eats the fruit, should at least plant the seed… there are seeds enough which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor.” Scholar Joel Porte argues that Thoreau is expressing here a  “fable of dissemination” to set against New England’s grim gospel of decline and decay. Indeed, our consent is not even required, as nature “condescend(s) to make use of us even without our knowledge, as when we help to scatter her seeds in our walks, and carry burrs and cockles on our clothes from field to field.” The meadow plants that spring up at our passing are the recollection of our own ephemeral comings and goings.

Though so closely associated with a particular place, Henry toward the end of his life was moving toward a theology of dispersal, embracing movement as the spirit animating the grand mystery of life. Only by staying in and studying one place with such fixity, perhaps, could Thoreau witness how movement aids the evolution of all these blind marvels.

Darwin arrived late for Thoreau, but he read and absorbed him with keenness in the last year of his life. He must have appreciated how Darwin begins in Origin of Species with the dispersal of fauna and flora, as Bradley Dean points out in the Introduction to his edition of Thoreau’s writings on plants. I want to say that Darwin recognized that the appearance of species here and there on the surface of the earth constituted a kind of memory: a recording not of discrete episodes of separate creation, but the movement and metamorphosis of species into other species, of bodies changing into other bodies. 

In the late blush of his Darwinian awakening, Thoreau observes that “we find ourselves in a world that is already planted, but is also still being planted as at first.” By the same logic, we are blown into a world already thronged with memories; coming to rest in their midst, we twine with them and become memory ourselves.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses mostly is read today as a gathering of myth and tale, a source book for renaissance poets, and a compendium of strange Mediterranean lore. Writers find their way to its freshness again and again—recently in the furious, lacerating retellings of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung, in which Nina McLaughlin dramatizes the uncanny estrangements women suffer in (and outside of) Ovid’s tales. I’ve come to think of these as stories of kinship and entanglement, too, as signaled in Ovid’s famous opening line: “Now I think of how bodies change form,”—or, as I have it in my version, “My thoughts turn to telling how things / change into other things.” True to its title, things indeed are ever changing in the Metamorphoses: heroes take the form of slain beasts; an aged couple entwines into trees; white fruits turn red to remember the spilled blood of lovers. We recall less often, however, that Ovid's astonishing opening kicks off a cosmogony: a story of the creation of the world.

Ovid wrote the Metamorphoses in the first years of our western age, a time when theories about the nature of things flowed together from across the Mediterranean world in fertile, uneasy patterns and overlaps. Roman views of nature were very different from our own, with the human world of striving fully contained within the natural realm, and such phenomena as lightning, flood, and famine arriving as messages from divine regions. Although ancient Greek and Roman ideas of creation can seem far removed from our understanding, I find Ovid’s vision haunting and provocative. His cosmogony lives at the fragrant, crackling border where flows and forces meet and make a world together. 

I sense a rich ambivalence flickering through his vision. Is world-making the work of a single, mastering god, or a clash of phenomenal properties, the foamy rising-up of the living world? Ovid’s line is, Hanc deus et melior litem natura diremit—literally, “this (disorder), god and better nature settled.” My fancy falls on the “and”—the coupling of natural and godly agency. Across the poem’s many Englishings, translators have struggled with this holy ambivalence; singing of god and nature in the language of redemption or negotiation, Ovid’s dappled discourse and the inflectional force fields of Latin nourish my own great doubt. 

This is not a classicist’s Metamorphoses. I come to the poem as one raised amid the ransacking of the living world, with an imagination fired by cosmology and microbiology, filtered through a modern mythology of images like those conjured in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. My version of Ovid’s cosmology feeds on anachronism and ambivalence; here, the world begins as a bubbling batch of sourdough, the Big Bang and Genesis sing together, and ambitious apes make their belated appearance, bloody and foreboding. As the living world is stirred, fixed, bid to spread and sink and effervesce—whether by the work of godly hands or the swerve of emergent forces—the divinity of all this action is clear.

My thoughts turn to telling about how things 
Change into other things. May the gods, who
In change have been changing all along, 
Breathe life into my notions and turn them into song.

Before the sea and earth were skinned by sky, 
Everything in the world had the same look.
Let’s call it chaos: a raw, disordered mass,
Ponderous and inert, a formless slurry
Poorly mixed. There was no sunlight to warm
This matrix, no moon to crown the night;
The earth unsupported by air, as yet unbalanced;
And mother ocean’s arms embraced no shore, for 
Land and earth and air were mixed. Unstable lands,
insolvent seas; nothing held its shape, and all 
opposed all: cold fought heat, the moist was dry,
The soft was hard, the buoyant bore down.

All this, some god or gentling nature redeemed:
Spun air from land and land from seas,
Divided the liquid winds and starry skies
Which, separate from the blurry mass,
Now moved together in uneasy peace.
The fiery weightless vault of heaven, 
Set in its place, became a binding wall;
Next the air arose billowing and filled it up,
And densest earth settled in below, sifting all
Its elements; and the waters flowed around, 
Encircling solid ground.

And then this never-known god at first of earth
unmixing this messy congeries
and separating its elements
gathered it all up in a great globe.
Then swiftly poured the seaways out, bid them swell
with the fleet winds, and wrapped the whole of earth in shore.
Then added springs and pools and soundless lakes,
crowned with crowding banks the slicing streams
that filter through fields in many places
until, arriving at the receiving sea,
they break from their banks to beat the shore.
Then bid fields to spread, valleys to sink,
wood to clothe itself in leaf, the stony mountains to rise.
And dividing the heavens, two portions at right, 
two at left, and a torrid fifth between,
this careful god so laded the earth as well.
Above it all: the air, lighter than earth
Or water, though heavy enough to ballast fire. 

Next fixed in air the mist and clouds;
Shook loose the thunder, which shivers us still, and with this
Forced lightning amid the Winds. For all their powers
The sky would be no free-fly zone: the worldmaker strove to restrain
Them, as they marshaled their forces along clashing courses, which
Would have shred the world with the bigness of their brotherly strife.
East Wind withdrew to farthest dawn, to Persian Nabataea,
And ranges immersed in morning light; West Wind went
To evening, to warm the farthest shores; into Scythia,
With its seven oxen-driven stars, North Wind and its horrors seeped;
South Wind withdrew to the opposite pole, spewing mist and showers.
Over all of these imposed the air: liquid, weightless, as yet unpolluted.
And as these forces drew back, the stars, so long
Hidden in the mix, foamed up across the whole of sky.

Nor would any region lack its living creatures, though the sky
And its stars keep only the forms of the gods.
Shining waves gave way for fish to dwell, 
Earth took the wild beasts, and the air was stirred with flight.

And now arose some lofty animal of hungry mind to dominate,
Though it wants for nothing. Was the human species born,
Or fashioned from some godly seed? Did our thingmaker think
to make the world a better place? Or was their purpose Promethean: 
to mold from earth so fresh, so newly wiled from air,
To raise up from this same stock, this holy germ,
To mix with rain and wave, and shape an image of the reigning gods?
Where other animals incline to earthly things,
The human yields only to the sublime, and entranced ever upward
Stands upright gaping at the stars.
So the world, arisen wild and unenvisaged, 
Now confronts this hominid’s ignorant-figured force. 

Speaking of metamorphosis: Metamorphosis of memory circuits in Drosophila reveals a strategy for evolving a larval brain. The brains of holometabolous insects—those bugs with distinct larval and adult forms—have long presented a mystery. With the organism essentially liquefying and reforming in metamorphosis, what of the creature’s brain—and to a certain extent, its identity—remains intact? The authors of this incredible analysis followed the fates of most of the neurons in the fruit fly’s “mushroom bodies,” structures in the insect forebrain responsible for memory. The journal article is pretty heady; Quanta has a good breakdown of this work.

A Portrait of Tenochtitlan. Artist Thomas Kole’s haunting digital renderings of the Aztec capital ca. 1518, three years before the sacking of the city by Hernan Cortez and his allies, which led to the fall of the Aztec Empire. Kole’s landscapes convey the incredible achievement of the city—it must have been a sight to behold—and suggest the teeming humanity of the place as well. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the renderings, but given the Aztec’s ghastly reputation, it feels like a healthy corrective. This was a place where people lived and strove.

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