Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Chapter 11 - Stalking

The point is that it (the world, love, fish, muskrats, or electrons) is all rather fleeting. What we can see or experience or ‘know’ must be stalked. We must go looking and learn to be still, or we will never see. We get, if we will set ourselves to the task, what Moses got, which was to witness the glory of God from the cleft in the rock, witnessing the fleeting ‘hind-parts’ of God (Ex 33:22-3). We may see the Promised Land from the top of Pisgah, and our longing for more, well, moments or glimpses are all you get.

I wonder if we could make room in our schedules to pay attention. Even if our attention was being paid to people, could we go listening? People are always revealing the story of their lives. Dillard talks about the spiritual quality of stalking fish. Have you ever tried to watch fish (not in an aquarium!)? Fish are pretty skittish in the wild. They would rather not be seen (stalked, captured, or eaten). They often do not look like the water-bottom. They are reflectors of light, fleeting flashes of glory. It is any wonder that Jesus calls fishermen?

Quotes:

I am prying into secrets again, and taking my chances. I might see anything happen; I might see nothing but light on water. I walk home exhilarated or becalmed, but always changed, alive. (186)

More men in all of time have died at fishing than at any other human activity except perhaps the making of war. ... You can lure them, net them, troll for them, club them, clutch them, chase them up the inlet, stun them with plant juice, catch them in a wooden wheel that runs all night – and you still might starve. They are there, they are certainly there, free, food, and wholly fleeting. You can see them if you want to; catch them if you can. (188)

If I freeze, locking my muscles, I will tire and break. Instead of going ridged, I go calm. I center down wherever I am; I find balance and repose. I retreat – not inside myself, but outside myself, so that I am a tissue of senses. Whatever I see is plenty, abundance. (203)

The Principle of Indeterminacy turned science inside out. Suddenly determinism goes, causality goes, and we are left with a universe composed of what Eddington calls “mind-stuff.” (206)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Fecundity (10)

Chapter Ten: Fecundity

When it comes to reproduction, do we feel differently about plants and animals? I think we do. One could be a subject of polite discussion and the other is not. Why do you suppose that is?

There is tremendous growth pressure. It appears to be in the design of the Designer. Growth happens. Life is stubborn and insistent. Sycamore roots break sidewalks. Mushrooms can shatter a cement basement floor. And human beings will wreck themselves because of growth pressure. As we seek love and a companion and sex and children, it seems to be, in seasons, all consuming.

Consider life in the waters, in the ponds and lakes and oceans. Do you ever consider how much life and death and left-overs are teeming in the waters? We push these kinds of ideas away. It ruins swimming in the ocean. It makes us think, “That’s gross!” Of course I can hardly swim in a pond, or a lake, for the very same reasons. It is full of life! How does God consider the life of the barnacle? Are the individual barnacles important to God? What about the individual lives of whales? Or rats? Or cats? Or dolphins? Or horses? Or us? Does God care about the fish that we eat, or the cows?

Either Mother Nature is a monster, or human beings are a freak of nature, somehow different from the way of the cosmos. It could be that our emotions are a curse, that we should accommodate ourselves to the amoral natural reaction to life and death. This is also unacceptable to us. What does nature have to say to us about Creation and the Creator? I do not think we can close our eyes, or refuse to think about what we see. I suppose many do refuse to see and refuse to consider the implications of what they see. I cannot refuse either.

Quotes:

I don’t know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives. (162)

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. ... No, in the plant world, especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is as a population explosion among field mice. (164)

Bamboo can grow three feet in twenty-four hours. (165)

“Acres and acres of rats” has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, “acres and acres of tulips.” (167)

Rock barnacles: The barnacles encrusting a single half-mile of shore can leak into the water a million million larvae. ... My point about rock barnacles is those million million larvae in ‘milky clouds’ and those shed flecks of skin. Sea water seems suddenly to be but a broth of barnacle bits. Can I fancy that a million million human infants are more real? (168)

The pressure of growth among animals is a terrible kind of hunger. These billions must eat in order to fuel their surge to sexual maturity so that they may pump out more billions of eggs. (170)

Lacewings are those fragile green insects with large, rounded transparent wings. The larvae eat enormous numbers of aphids, the adults mate in a fluttering rush of instinct, lay eggs, and die by the millions in the first cold snap of fall. Sometimes when a female lays her fertile eggs on a green leaf atop a slender stalked thread, she is hungry. She pauses in her laying, turns around, and eats her eggs one by one, then lays more, and eats them, too. Anything can happen, and anything does; what’s it all about?

Valerie Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s widow, wrote in a letter to the London Times: My husband, T. S. Eliot, loved to recount how late one evening he stopped a taxi. As he got in the driver said, “You’re T. S. Eliot.” When asked how he knew, he replied, “Ah, I have an eye for a celebrity. Only the other evening I picked up Bertrand Russell, and I said to him, “Well, Lord Russell, what’s it all about?” and do you know, he couldn’t tell me.” Well, Lord God, asks the delicate, dying lacewing whose mandibles are wet with juice secreted by her own ovipositor, what’s it all about? (“And do you know...”) (170-1)

I have to look at the landscape of the blue-green world again. Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone. (177)

Are my values then so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point. (178)

We value the individual supremely, and nature values him not a whit. (178)

Either this world, my mother is a monster, or I myself am a freak. We are moral creatures in an amoral world. (179)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Flood

Chapter Nine: Flood

The book turns here. "Flood" is about a washing away. She writes a report about Hurricane Agnes in 1972.

My favorite line:

Tinker Creek is out of its four-foot banks, way out, and it’s still coming. The high creek doesn’t look like our creek. Our creek splashes transparently over a jumble of rocks; the high creek obliterates everything in flat opacity. It looks like somebody else’s creek that has usurped and eaten our creek and is roving frantically to escape, big and ugly, like a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer.

What an image? I would never have thought of a blacksnake caught in a kitchen drawer! Does that happen at your house? I am not opening your drawers if that is happening at your house!

We have seen some of these world changing weather events. Hurricane Andrew in South Florida in 1992, Katrina in 2005 and this year (2008), Ike. New Orleans will be changed by Katrina. Galveston has been changed by Ike. We will tell stories about our experiences in these storms. Something has been washed away. I wonder about floods of different types in our life. On one side of the flood our lives were a particular way, and then after the flood, life is different. It could be a death in your family. The flood could be a failed relationship, or the loss of a job, or a career. There is a line in the movie, Angels in the Outfield, where the children see the pitcher and excitedly say, “You used to be Mel Clark!” The pitcher gets it. He says to the kids, “Yeah, kid, I used to be.”

There is something on the other side of the flood. In our family, we have come to call it “new normal.” Old normal will not be returning. Our routines have changes. Our perspective is changed. Our bell has been rung, never to be un-rung. In our culture we use Latin phrases to speak of the era before, like ante-diluvium (before the flood) and antebellum (before the war). If find that interesting. We don’t talk about the present, or the future that way. We must, in some way, be like Lot’s wife (Gen 19:26) or a poor plowman (Luke 9:62), looking back over our shoulders, considering what we used to be.

Intricacy - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Chapter Eight: Intricacy

This is the culmination of the Via Positiva – Seeing God from what can be seen.
How hard would it be for you to make a tree? Would the task be easier if the tree did not have to actually work? It would not have to grow, or reproduce, or respirate. How hard would it be?

How hard would it be to make a kidney, with the intricacy of the nephron and a Henle’s Loop? Each nephron in your kidney about fifteen yards long. Each human kidney has about a million nephrons. We could not imagine a kidney, much less make one.

When we can see, when we can force ourselves to pay attention, there is an amazing complexity to the world around us, under our feet, over the next hill, and into the sky.

What do you think about evolution? I would say that evolution clearly happens. That in no way trumps the idea of a Creator. The more I can see, the more I believe in wonder, the more I am astonished at the extravagance of the Creator. The Creator creates! Look closely! There is a ‘wow’ in every molecule!

Quotes:

• If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring’s center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. (127-8)


• ‘Nature,’ said Thoreau in his journal, ‘is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work.’ The creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture of least works that is the world with a spendthrift genius and an extravagance of care. This is the point. (128)


• This is our life, these are our lighted seasons, and then we die. In the mean time, in between time, we can see. The scales are fallen from our eyes, the cataracts are cut away, and we can make sense of the color-patches we see in an effort to discover where we so incontrovertibly are. (129)


• The average temperature of our planet is 57 degrees Fahrenheit. Of the 29% of all land that is above water, over a third is given to grazing. The average size of all living animals, including man, is almost that of a housefly. The earth is mostly granite, which in turn is mostly oxygen. The most numerous of animals big enough (for us) to see are the cope pods, the mites, and the springtails; of the plants, the algae, the sledge. (129)


• Everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous. (130)


• Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form. (136-7)


• Of all known forms of life, only about 10 percent are still living today. (138)


• Pliny, who knew the world was round, figured that when it was all surveyed the earth would be seen to resemble a pineapple, pricked with irregularities. (140)


• Were the earth smooth, our brains would be smooth as well (no complex thinking required); we would wake, blink, walk tow steps to get the whole picture, and lapse into a dreamless sleep. (141)


• ‘Every religion that does not affirm that God is hidden,’ said Pascal flatly, ‘is not true.’ (146)


• No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe. (146)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Spring

Chapter Seven: Spring

This is the penultimate chapter of the first half of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  As Spring emerges, life makes itself visible again.  The word that captured me on this reading was heaves.  Life heaves from the ground, water lifts through the trees.  I wonder if we could be still and diligent at the same time.  Could we listen to bird-song with a sense of wonder?  In the Fall in Houston we could see thousands of birds competing for a place on the wires and telephone poles.  I would never stop to listen.  I might watch and wonder from inside the car, but I have better sense than to stand under the swirl of thousands of birds!

As with other chapters, Dillard wants us to pay attention to the extravagant life that surrounds us.  This Fall I read Justinian’s Flea by William Rosen.  He is talking about bubonic plague.  He reminds us that most of the biomass on earth is bacteria.  We don’t look.  And if we don’t look, then perhaps we do not have to consider or contemplate that life.  How are we similar to rotifers, plankton and paramecia, or bacteria?

 

The more we see, the more we consider the wonder and the awe.  There is life!  When we are willing to see it, I think it shapes our meta-narratives, the stories that define our lives, our context, our reality.  We live in a Design that grows and breathes.  We live in a world where energy comes from the sun, and miracles, weird and wonderful, happen.  Would we look Life in the eye?

 

Quotes:     

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.  There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing.  If the mockingbird were chirping to give us the long-sought formulae for a unified field theory, the point would be only slightly less irrelevant.  The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful? (107)

Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does heave a ton of water every day.  A big elm in a single season might make as many as six million leaves, wholly intricate, without budging an inch; I couldn’t make one. (113)

I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany.  We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing, grows toward growing, and growing green and clean. (114)

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.  On a sunny day, the sun’s energy on a square acre of land or pond can equal 4500 horsepower.  These “horses” heave in every direction, like slaves building pyramids, and fashion, from the bottom up, a new and sturdy world.(119)

I don’t really look forward to these microscopic forays...I do it as a moral exercise; the microscope at my forehead is a kind of phylactery, a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget. (122)

If I did not know about the rotifers and paramecia, and all the bloom of plankton clogging the dying pond, fine; but since I’ve seen it I must somehow deal with it, take it into account. (123)

Exodus as Intentional Family Curriculum

These are notes from a Sunday Morning class I taught on October 26 at North Street.

I want us to spend some time in Exodus.  This is the foundation for a series of lessons I plan to preach in March and April of next year.  This is gleaned from a lecture by Walter Brueggemann.

Grandparents help grandchildren remember.  Exodus is an antidote to amnesia. Exodus is about tracing out connections.  Exodus is about tracing our moral codes, providing expectations for life, painting the picture of a river of belonging.

What if we read this as a key to the whole?

Exodus 10:1-2 (NRSV) ¹ Then the Lord said to Moses, "Go to Pharaoh; for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his officials, in order that I may show these signs of mine among them, ² and that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I have made fools of the Egyptians and what signs I have done among them—so that you may know that I am the Lord."

 

Exodus is intentional family curriculum.  It depicts the competition between Pharaoh and Yahweh. Youth (perhaps in every age) have no feeling of debt to the past. All of our grandparent’s stuff becomes antique and obsolete. 

Was it about amnesia?  The empire has a vested interest in local amnesia.  It makes for a group of people easy to control (or easier anyway).  Look to the theme of Deuteronomy 8, Don’t forget.

This was always in play.  The forces of forgetfulness would say, Join Alexander, Join Rome, forget particularity, jettison memory.

 Exodus

 1. Remember the midwives.  They are named Shiphrah and Puah. Pharaoh is not named.  The midwives are significant.  They refused imperial fear and coercion.  The future comes down to mothers.  They have seething courage.  They are the ones to hold up the pictures of the Disappeared (of Argentina).  These are the mothers who take a casserole to the grieving. These are the mothers who made fools of the commandos of Pharaoh.  They are HISTORY MAKERS. 

2. Remember the terrorist activity of Pharaoh (and Moses).  Someone had to act.  The action did not come by innocence.  It was in Moses’ mis-adventure (murder of the Egyptian) that he challenged the status quo.  The truth is that oppression, forced labor, and exploitation requires confrontation. How?  We wrestle with that!
3. Remember the theophony. The bush burns.  The Voice of Holiness calls.  It is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  We can expect an interruption from God.  He answers the cry of his people.  Exodus 3:10 (NRSV) ¹⁰ So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt." 

1. Who? Me?  Yahweh says, “I will go with you.”
2. What is your name?  YHWH.  Tell them.
3. I have no power!  What if they will not listen?  What is that in your hand?  Put your hand in your cloak.  It will be a contest of power against power. (I am thinking he will need that with Zipporah, too!)
4. And there will be a renovation of the economy.  The Nile will turn to blood.  The cattle and the land and the laws of inheritance will all be demolished.
5. I can’t speak well.  I will speak through you.
6. Send someone else.  No! 

4. Remember the Bricks. 

1. Produce bricks, and when it seems you have too much time, time for worship on your hands, then you could work harder.  Meet the quota.
2. It is oppressive.  It is coercive economic theory.  That is true in academics, sports, sales, and church.
3. There is no oasis unless you depart!!
4. We have a tendency to absolutize the present power arrangements. If our grandparents knew that this was not always the way things were they could give us hope in the face of acquisitive power. 

5. Remember the death of the Firstborn and the Passover.

• The death of the first born raises a loud cry!  Every arrogant power is humiliated.  Pharaoh says, "Rise up, go away from my people, both you and the Israelites! Go, worship the Lord, as you said. ³² Take your flocks and your herds, as you said, and be gone. And bring a blessing on me too!" Exodus 12:31-32 (NRSV).
• Truth and pain are brought against power by YHWH (not by rebellion, not by force of arms, but by ‘the death of a first born – Jesus).

When the people LEFT what they knew, they were afraid.  I understand that.  It is the place where you lose control.  They grumbled.  Moses told them, ‘You have only to be still.’

On the other side of the water we hear a moment of song. 

In chapter 15 Miriam sings.  The Lord will reign forever.  There is a regime change.  There is a new order.

There is no short cut for this story.  You cannot begin to live this out where you wish.  You have to live it out.

Michael Walzer, ( Exodus and Revolution, 149)

• first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
  
• second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
  
• and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.”  There is no other way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.
  

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Present

We spend so much of our lives getting ready to live.  Years ago I heard a mantra from Randy Harris that I think is terrific.  It has four parts.  I will be incompetent.  That is not a goal, but a confession before the fact.  The standards I am pursuing are idealistic and important.  I will not abandon the ideal.  I will be incompetent.  I will be fully present.  I will see Christ in the face of every person I encounter.  I will be Christ in every situation I encounter. 

 

When Annie Dillard speaks of The Present, she is living in the now.  I wonder how long we can pay attention to one thing.  How long does an experience last?  I wonder if we could pay more attention.  Consciousness is an interesting concept.  When the lights flicker on behind the eyes, when the neural network opens for reactive input, do we have any control?  Consciousness is vital, but self-consciousness is (or can be) a hindrance to being fully present.

 

Have you had those moments that you wish would at least pause?  We want to soak in it, or soak it in.  It is too much to think it could last forever, but it could slow, couldn’t it?  I am sure that is why we love photographs, or paintings.  We will even call it ‘a capture.’  But that is not really true.  The ‘capture’ is in our memory, and the ‘capture’ is nothing more than an aide for remembering.

 

Dillard writes:

 

• This is it, I think, this is it, right now, the present, this empty gas station, here, this western wind, this tang of coffee on the tongue, and I am patting the puppy, I am watching the mountain.  And the second I verbalize this awareness in my brain, I cease to see the mountain or feel the puppy.  (80)
• Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall. (82)
• There are a few live seasons.  Let us live them as purely as we can, in the present. (83)
• Michael Goldman wrote in a poem, ‘When the Muse comes She doesn’t tell you to write; / She says get up for a minute, I’ve something to show you, stand here.’ (85)
• I want to come at the subject of the present by showing how consciousness dashes and ambles around the labyrinthine tracks of the mind, returning again and again, however briefly, to the senses. (88)
• Dorothy Dunnett: There is no reply, in clear terrain, to an archer in cover. Invisibility is the all-time great cover; and the one infinite power deals so extravagantly and unfathomably in death ... makes that power an archer, there is no getting around it. (91)
• The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child. (91)
• Arthur Koestler wrote, “In his review of the literature on the psychological present, Woodrow found that its maximum span is estimated to lie between 2.3 and 12 seconds.” (93-4)
• In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found ‘an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 spring tails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various members of 12 other forms ... Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae – in a mere teaspoon of soil.’ (95)
• The world is a wild wrestle under the grass; earth shall be moved. (98)
• Like water flow: Ease is the way of perfection, letting fall. (102)
• You don’t run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets.  You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.  You’ll have fish left over. (104)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - Untying the Knot

Via Positiva

Chapter Five: Untying the Knot

 “I wonder how long it would take you to notice the recurrence of the seasons if you were the first man on earth.  What would it be like to live in open-ended time broken only by days and night? ... How long would you have to live on earth before you could feel with any assurance that any one particular period of cold would, in fact, end?” (75)

 

This idea sends me off thinking in several directions. 

• The first is that we are so fond of ‘trending.’  Can you imagine living in the first warming trend?  You are coming out of winter, the temperature is rising.  Where will it peak (like the price of gasoline, or the stock-market, or your weight!)?  If the temperature continues to rise at this rate, say 5 degrees a day, we will burn up by next month!!
• The second is our cultural fascination with seasons.  People are trekking to the Northeast to see the season turn!  Last year I was in Gettysburg in November and it was stunning!  We celebrate the changes.  We look forward to the first freeze.  We marvel at the first snow!  On Christmas Eve, was it 2004, we were having our Christmas Eve service in Houston and it was snowing!  It was beautiful, wonderful, stunning.  And in the spring, when the trees bud, when the grass greens, we are comforted.  We were made for rhythm.
• The third is our need to reassure one another.  This will not last forever.  It was the summer of 1980.  How many days was it that it was over a 100 degrees in Texas?  Wichita Falls recorded a high of 117!  And I wonder if that is the way of life.  The Great Depression was not permanent.  I have been reading about the Bubonic Plague in the last days of the Roman Empire (during the reign of Justinian).  Would it ever end?  In the midst, you think it will never end.  However, so far, those who have lived though the cycles will tell you, this too shall pass.
• Then, someday, the knot will untie.  That is the witness of Scripture anyway.  Someday the cycle will cease.  Can we even imagine?  

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek - The Fixed

Via Positiva

 Chapter Four: The Fixed

Life and the world, the universe (whatever that is) is a curious combination of the fluid (changing and dynamic) and the fixed.  I wonder if we are not in the image of God to the degree that we can occasionally interrupt the fixed.  We are not really talented at it. Our interruptions are often clumsy and yield unintended consequences.

When your eyes are open to this world, what do you see?  It seems to me that it is not always neat and clean according to my sensibilities.  I would say it is rough and rowdy, profligate (extravagant) and deadly.  Biochemistry is making things happen in amazing and weird ways!

• Praying Mantis: “If the eggs survive ants, woodpeckers, and mice – and most – then you get the fun of seeing the new mantises hatch, and the smug feeling of knowing, all summer long, that they’re out there in your garden devouring gruesome numbers of fellow insects all nice and organically.  When a mantis has crunched up the last shed of its victim, it cleans its smooth green face like a cat.” (56)
  
• Adult mantises eat more or less everything that breathes and is small enough to capture. (56)
• The mating rites of mantises are well known: a chemical produced in the head of the male insect says, in effect, “No, don’t go near her, you fool, she’ll eat you alive”  At the same time a chemical in his abdomen says, “Yes, by all means, now and forever, yes.”  While the male is making up what passes for his mind, the female tips the balance in her favor by eating his head. (59) (She has her reproductive way with headless him. Then she eats him!)
• Polyphemus moth: The whole cocoon twisted and slapped around in the bottom of the jar.  The teacher fades, the classmates fade, I fade: I don’t remember anything but that things struggle to be a moth or die trying. (62)
• He couldn’t spread his wings.  There was no room.  The chemical that coated his wings like varnish, stiffening them permanently, dried and hardened his wings as they were.  He was a monster in a Mason jar. (62)
• Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another. (64)

When we see nature acting in this way – wasps squeezing the honey out of a honeybee, licking the honey from the bee’s tongue while a mantis comes and clutches the wasp and begins to saw and gnaw while the wasp continues to feast in the throws of death – what is communicated about the Intelligent Designer? That God experiments?  That there is no end to creativity?  That there is a world that we often refuse to see because these are not thoughts we wish to think?  Insects make up a considerable about of the world’s biomass.  Maybe we should be looking at bacteria, the life form that takes up the greatest percentage of the world’s biomass.  It all challenges one’s view of the cosmos. 

Winter - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Via Positiva

 Chapter Three: Winter

 This chapter is a bit of a travel log.  She speaks of Starlings and spiders and coots and the weather.  Everywhere she is respecting both life and death.  She is in awe of the work that life does.  Have you ever hesitated to disturb a spider web, knowing that the spider has worked so diligently?  Have you ever looked at your old insect collection and thought that maybe is was a cruel exercise in presumed sovereignty?

 

Desiderata:

• Starlings: “According to Edwin Way Teale, ‘Their coming was the result of one man’s fancy.  That man was Eugene Shieffelin, a wealthy New York drug manufacturer.  His curious hobby was the introduction to America of all the birds mentioned in William Shakespeare.’” (37)  (He released 100 in Central Park in NYC. Now Starlings are ubiquitous and stubbornly entrenched.)
• “Winter clear-cuts and reseeds the easy way.  Everywhere paths unclog.” (40)
• “All that summer conceals, winter reveals” (40)  (In winter, when the leaves are dropped, there is something different to see.)
• “I’m getting used to this planet and to this curious human culture which is cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.” (43)
• “When his father was young, he used to walk out on Great South Bay, which has frozen over, and frozen the gulls to it.  Some of the gulls were already dead.  He would take a hunk of driftwood and brain the living gulls; then with a steel knife he hacked them free below the body and rammed them into a burlap sack.  The family ate herring gull all winter, close around a lighted table in a steamy room.  And out on the Bay, the ice was studded with paired, red stumps” (43)  (Something in this made me laugh, is that the cheerfully cruel in me?)
• “Things out of place are ill.” (53) (She says this when she has a cocoon of spiders in her pocket! Out of place and ill.)

Seeing - Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Via Positiva

 Chapter Two

 Seeing

 ·         “I have been thinking about seeing.  There are lots of things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises.” (17)

·         “What you see is what you get.” (17)

Her point is that it may seem mundane, the things you can see.  It is like finding pennies.  Are you delighted to find a penny, or is that beneath you?  So much of our world passes us by without our thinking that it is remarkable.  It is like reading Scripture.  We think we know, so we are kept from hearing.  How often to you gaze at the stars and think about what you see?  How often do you look at an ant bed and think about what you see?

 

When it comes to nature, the sights are fleeting.  Nature is pervasive, but it also is fleeting.  Life is on the move.  One has to pay attention in order to take it in.  If you will take it in, there is wonder.

·         “If I can’t see the minutia, I still try to keep my eyes open.” (19)

·         “After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests. … An uneasy pink here, an unfathomable blue there, gave great suggestion to lurking beings.  Things were going on.” (22)

·         “At this latitude I’m spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis; I often fancy I feel my sweeping fall as a breakneck arc like the dive of dolphins, and the hollow rushing of wind raises hair on my neck and the side of my face.  I orbit around the sun I’m moving 64,800 miles an hour.” (23)

·         “If we are blinded by darkness, we are also blinded by light.”  (24)  One example is a meteor shower in the middle of the day.

·         “We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree.  Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful, taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.” (25)

·         “This looking business is risky.” (25)

 When your eyes are open, you can look millions of light years into space.  When your eyes are open you can see the abundance of life in a glass or bowl of pond water.  It is extravagant!

Dillard tells of people who are newly sighted.  They have been blind from birth.  They have learned to navigate the world in a particular way.  When they receive sight, they may refuse to use it.  It is disorienting.  It is overwhelming.  One girl, aged 21, would close her eyes whenever she went out of the house. 

• “She is never happier than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.” (30)
  
• “Some delight in their sight and give themselves over to the visual world.” (31)
• “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it.” (33)
• “When I see this way I analyze and pry, I hurl over logs and roll away stones; I study the bank a square foot at a time, probing and tilting my head.” (33)
• “But there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.  When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied.  The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera.  When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.  When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut.” (33)

How can you do it?  How can you see?  She says that the challenge of her life is to quiet the interior conversation in her head.  The secret, she says, is the pearl of great price.  It can be found, but probably not by pursuit.  The discipline is to practice openness, to be ready to see.  I think this is true all over God’s world.  I need to practice being non-self-absorbed.  Then I can see in the dark and in the light.  I can see, so to say, with a camera, or even in the ecstasy of being the camera, taking it all in with wonder and awe.

• “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

I cannot tell you how that resonates with me.  Oh, for the openness to position ourselves to see, to perceive, to be in the place where the moment of realization of who you are and where you are is understood.