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.

Heaven and Earth In Jest

Via Positiva

It is the known, or perhaps that is an overstatement. There are some things that we can see. We try to make sense of what we see. Annie Dillard has written a book about seeing. She is walking near Tinker Creek, Virginia and she sees some things in nature. Nature has a voice. It is difficult to see clearly. It is also presumptuous to say that we understand what we see. However, we ought to look and we ought to think. What kind of world is this?

As I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I am another step removed from seeing. I am listening as Annie Dillard sees. She thinks and I think along with her. Then I begin to pay attention to the world, to see for myself, and to live in wonder at the sight, the sound, the voice.

Chapter One

Heaven and Earth In Jest

• “I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing.” (4)


• “And just as I looked at him (a frog), he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. ... An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. ... ‘Giant water bug’ is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown bug. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim’s muscles and bones and organs – all but the skin – and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim’s body, reduced to a juice.” (8)


• “That it’s rough out there and chancy is no surprise.” (9)


• “What do we think of the created universe, spanning an unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? ... If the giant water bug was not made in jest, was it then be made in earnest?” (9)


• Einstein: ‘God is subtle, but not malicious.” (9)


• Her question is: What does nature say? Is it violent and cruel? Yes. Is it powerful and beautiful and somehow awe inspiring to us? Undoubtedly.

“We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what is going on here.” (11)