Notice what this poem is not doing

The light along the hills in the morning
comes down slowly, naming the trees
white, then coasting the ground for stones to nominate.
Notice what this poem is not doing.
A house, a house, a barn, the old
quarry, where the river shrugs—
how much of this place is yours?
Notice what this poem is not doing.
Every person gone has taken a stone
to hold, and catch the sun. The carving
says, “Not here, but called away.”
Notice what this poem is not doing.
The sun, the earth, the sky, all wait.
The crowns and redbirds talk. The light
along the hills has come, has found you.
Notice what this poem has not done.

— William Stafford

Life—Big questions about the big picture

There is a black hole at the heart of biology. Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is. All complex life on earth shares a common ancestor, a cell that arose from simple bacterial progenitors on just one occasion in 4 billion years. Was this a freak accident, or did other ‘experiments’ in the evolution of complexity fail? We don’t know. We do know that this common ancestor was already a very complex cell. It had more or less the same sophistication as one of your cells, and it passed this great complexity on not just to you and me but to all its descendants, from trees to bees. I challenge you to look at one of your own cells down a microscope and distinguish it from the cells of a mushroom. They are practically identical. I don’t live much like a mushroom, so why are my cells so similar? It’s not just that they look alike. All complex life shares an astonishing catalogue of elaborate traits, from sex to cell suicide to senescence, none of which is seen in a comparable form in bacteria. There is no agreement about why so many unique traits accumulated in that single ancestor, or why none of them shows any sign of evolving independently in bacteria. Why, if all of these traits arose by natural selection, in which each step offers some small advantage, did equivalent traits not arise on other occasions in various bacterial groups? These questions highlight the peculiar evolutionary trajectory of life on earth.

— from the opening of Nick Lane’s new book, The Vital Question

Lane tells a story that begins with a single microscopic event. After life had been on earth for 2 billion years—ubiquitous, diverse, successful, endlessly creative, but always microscopic, one cell at a time— one archaea cell engulfed an aerobic bacterium that had figured out how to burn sugar for energy. We are all descended from that one event, that one cell. Every cell in your body and my body, and also the mushroom and the jellyfish and the fig leaf, all cells are descended from that one.

Lane asks: Does that mean it was all contingent, an accident? If that one cell merger had not taken place when it did, could earth have gone on for billions of years more, home to only microscopic life?

Stray Birds

THAT I exist
is a perpetual surprise
which is life.

SOME unseen fingers, like idle breeze,
are playing upon my heart the music of the ripples.

‘WHAT language is thine, O sea?’
‘The language of eternal question.’
‘What language is thy answer, O sky?’
‘The language of eternal silence.’

LISTEN, my heart,
to the whispers of the world
with which it makes love to you.

THE mystery of creation
is great like the darkness of night—

Delusions of knowledge are like
the fog of the morning.

WHAT I am I do not see,
what I see is my shadow.

I cannot choose the best;
The best chooses me.

— Rabindranath Tagore, born this day in 1861

Lumina

Lumina ce-o simt
năvălindu-mi în piept când te vad,
oare nu e un strop din lumina
creată în ziua dintâi,
din lumina aceea-nsetată adânc de viaţă?

Nimicul zăcea-n agonie
când singur plutea-ntuneric şi dat-a
un semn Nepătrunsul:
"Să fie lumină!"

O mare
şi-un vifor nebun de lumină
facutu-s-a-n clipa:
o sete era de pacate, de-aventuri, de doruri, de patimi,
o sete de lume şi soare.

Dar unde-a pierit orbitoarea
lumină de-atunci - cine ştie?

Lumina ce-o simt năvălindu-mi
în piept când te vad - minunato,
e poate ca ultimul strop
din lumina creată în ziua dintâi.

— Lucian Blaga, born this day in 1895

The light that I feel
flooding my chest when I see you,
isn’t it, I wonder, a drop from the light
created on the first day,
from that light so thirsty of life?

The nothingness was lying in agony
when alone in the darkness it floated, and then
a sign made the Adamantine:
“Let it be light!”

A sea
and a storm with madness for light
appeared that moment:
the thirst was for elation, guilt, longing, passion,
the thirst was for a world and a sun.

But where did the blinding light of that time
go–who knows?

The light that I feel rushing
into my chest when I see you, wondrous being,
may well be the last drop
from that light created on the very first day.

—Translated from Romanian by Lori Tiron-Pandit.

Real inquiry has no method, no knowing—just wondering freely, vulnerably, what is it that is actually happening inside and out. Not the word, not the idea of it, not the reaction to it, but the simple fact.

— Toni Packer

“Add nothing to this experience.”

Don’t believe a word I say

I could not condemn ordinary men for lying, when I saw it in request amongst them that would be counted philosophical persons: yet could not but wonder at them, that, writing so manifest lies, they should not think to be taken with the manner; and this made me also ambitious to leave some monument of myself behind me, that I might not be the only man exempted from this liberty of lying: and because I had no matter of verity to employ my pen in (for nothing hath befallen me worth the writing), I turned my style to publish untruths, but with an honester mind than others have done: for this one thing I confidently pronounce for a truth, that I lie: and this, I hope, may be an excuse for all the rest, when I confess what I am faulty in: for I write of matters which I neither saw nor suffered, nor heard by report from others, which are in no being, nor possible ever to have a beginning. Let no man therefore in any case give any credit to them.

— Lucian of Samosata, the world’s first sci fi writer (125 - 190 AD)

‘Most of us have jobs that are too small for our spirits.

— Studs Terkel, born this day in 1912

Mankind, as a species, is close to the bees and ants in that we are hard pressed to survive individually, but depend on division of labor and tight social organization. Going with that territory is a structure of few leaders and many followers. Most humans have to shut up and obey in order for the system to function well. This ain’t so good for individual self-realization, but it is necessary for the function of the community.

Depression is an adaptation that evolved so that we can be numb and passive while suppressing our independence and adventurous spirit, so that we function effectively as serfs and keep the wheels turning. The deep cure for depression is a transformation of society to permit more self-actualization, more collective leadership, more opportunity for independent thought and action, less blind obedience and servitude.–JJM

Animal Language

Birds, mammals and even fish recognize the alarm signals of other species. Some can even eavesdrop on one another across classes. Red-breasted nuthatches listen to chickadees. Dozens of birds listen to tufted titmice, who act like the forest’s crossing guards. Squirrels and chipmunks eavesdrop on birds, sometimes adding their own thoughts. In Africa, vervet monkeys recognize predator alarm calls by superb starlings.

Birds are saying much more than we ever suspected, and other species have evolved to decode and understand the signals. Erick Greene (U of MT): “We’re trying to understand the ‘language’ of the forest.”

Raptors tend to be the biggest threat to birds nearest their own size because they can match the maneuverability of their prey. So a large goshawk might only merit a chick-a-dee-dee from a nimble chickadee, while that little pygmy owl will elicit a chick-a-dee followed by five or even 10 or 12 additional dee syllables, Dr. Greene said. “That sound humans hear simply as chick-a-dee actually could contain information differentiating between a Cooper’s hawk and a pygmy owl. We know birds hear this as if it’s slowed down,” he said.

— read more from today’s Science Times

BRICK

Have I bricked up unbricked what
perspective hole break of eye
seen what glowing place what
flower so close grows from a
tiny brown seed or was it what
I wanted this after imaged green
round sun faints under blue sky
or outser space that place no
one knows but for this echo of
sketched in color the stems of
the voluptuous flowers patient
myself inside looking still out.

— Robert Creeley, born this day in 1926

Evening Land

En främling är min vän, en som jag inte känner.
En främling långt långt borta.
För hans skull är mitt hjärta fullt av nöd.
För att han inte finns hos mig.
För att han kanske inte alls finns?
Vem är du som uppfyller mitt hjärta med din frånvaro?
Som uppfyller hela världen med din frånvaro?
Djupt som saknad
Vad är djupt som saknad.
Vad fyller våra hjärtan så som tomhet.
Vad uppfyller själen så som längtan efter något som inte finns,
som den vet inte finns.
Andra får ro hos dig.
Andra brinner i din eld, vilar i dina lågande armar.
Men vad är deras lycka
mot min tomhet,
deras glödande förening med dig
mot min ensamhet.

My friend is a stranger, someone I do not know.
A stranger far far away.
For his sake my heart is full of disquiet
because he is not with me.
Because, perhaps, after all he does not exist.
Who are you who so fill my heart with your absence?
Who fill the entire world with your absence?
You who existed before the mountains and the clouds,
before the sea and the winds.
You whose beginning is before the beginning of all things,
and whose joy and sorrow are older than the stars.
You who from eternity have wandered among the stars of the
Milky Way
and through the great darknesses between them.
You who were alone before loneliness,
and whose heart was full of disquiet
before any human heart did not forget me.

But how could you possibly remember me?
How could the sea possibly remember the sea-shell
that once it surged through?

— Pär Lagerkvist, born this day in 1891
tr W. H. Auden with Leif Sjöberg)

Musical wit

Listen to nine Bagatelles by William Bolcom, born this day in 1938

“By the side of the everlasting WHY there is a YES—a transitory YES if you like, but a YES.”

— E. M. Forster

After many conquests, we shall attain simplicity.

Aluna

The Kogi people have been living in the high Andes, much as their ancestors lived 1,000 years ago and more. They have admitted a few metal tools, but exclude visitors and communications. No one in their village speaks Spanish or any but their own local dialect.

In the 1980s, when Global Warming was off the radar of everyone except you, me and Al Gore, the Kogi recognized that something was wrong when they observed reduced snow cover in their high peaks region. They sent an emissary to town, and arranged to have a film made, transmitting their message to Technological Man, to whom they refer as ‘Little Brother’. “You mutilate the world because you don’t remember the Great Mother. If you don’t stop, the world will die.” 1995 BBC Documentary.

They spoke to us clearly, without anger. But 20 years passed and it seemed we weren’t listening. Aluna is the film they made as a follow-up.

What we must do is embrace the core understanding that motivates the attempt to listen to water in the first place: the understanding that nature is alive and intelligent, bearing certain qualities of a self that Western thought has arrogated to human beings alone. We must make it no longer an Other; we must grant to nature the same agency that this film humbly grants to the Kogi.

Granting subjectivity and agency to nature and everything in it does not mean to grant human subjectivity and human agency, making them into storybook versions of us. It means asking, “What does the land want? What does the river want? What does the planet want?”—questions that seem crazy from the perspective of nature-as-thing.

— read more from a Tikkun film review by Charles Eisenstein