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)