The Principles of Uncertainty

You cannot imagine the extraordinary experience of this book of paintings, words and photographs. (Sarah, you are going to FLIP if you have not seen this book yet!)

On May the 3rd 2006 Maria Kalman writes:

How can I Tell you Everything that is in My Heart.
Impossible to Begin. Enough. No. Begin

And suddenly the pages fill with paintings of Spinoza, Pavlov's dog, ladies hats and impossible hairdos, Shakespeare's ruff, a red-footed pigeon, remarkable packages, tassels on curtains, glistening pastries and people on the gray streets dressed in sartorial splendor. The range of what people care about spreads before you in dazzling, almost bewildering profusion. And underneath it all is a sweetness--Kalman's discerning, kindly artist's eye, recording the fleeting passage of lives.

There is a painting of the bare branches of a tree, and the words:

WE SEE TREES.

WHAT MORE DO
WE NEED?

Well put.

Tea & chocolate

Tea & chocolate
Stretched out on the couch
under my youngest son's blanket
bathed in golden sunlight
not working!
reading a novel
not a great novel
just a story
about a woman
who is not sure which way to turn.
Maybe life is like a garden.
You could design it this way or that
and it would probably be
just fine either way,
there are probably lots of ways
it would be really lovely.
And Nature will come in and do
Her own majestic and messy things,
too.


December 27, 2009

The Ones I Can't Live Without: Favorite Nature Books

If all else failed, these are the books I would want in hand, these invitations to explore and savor nature.

Louise J. Halle, Spring in Washington (NY, Atheneum, 1947)-- chief among them. Halle was a young State Department employee in 1945, when he slipped out daily before sunrise, swooping through city, riverside and marsh on his bicycle, observing with relish the progress of spring along the Potomac. An especially keen birder, his writing is fine and nimble, from the scientific to the philosophic and lyrical, with a dash of humor. Such a pleasure! What I perhaps most admire is the quiet independence of his preoccupation, his solitary choice to spend each dawn in the natural world.

To snatch the passing moment and exaine it for signs of eternity is the noblest of occupations.

Edwin Way Teale, A Walk Through the Year (NY, Dodd, Mead & Co, 2978). In the winter of 1998 - 1999, I was bedridden for 2 ½ months (sounds rather Victorian) and survived thanks to my family, meditation, and this book. For 18 years, I had been a landscape designer, and enjoyed daily contact with the out-of-doors. This book was like water to the parched-- a daily sojourn through the seasons, with Teale recording daily observations of natural life on his Connecticut farm.

From his entry for May 9:

Out in the meadow I look up High above me two red-shouldered hawks spin in an updraft. Just as I get my glasses focused on one of the soaring birds, it sweeps back its wings, tilts steeply downward, and like an arrowhead, streaks in a long plunge toward the earth. I follow it down and down. I see it near the ground, open its wings, check its descent and begin climbing upward again. A hawk sporting in the air of spring.

Get's me every time.

Marie Winn, Red-Tails in Love (NY, Pantheon Books, 1998). Switching back from countryside to town--Marie Winn, nature columnist for the Wall Street Journal, tells a tale of love and high drama along with the inside scoop on the Central Park world of New York naturalists, the Regulars, as they are called. Delightful!

And lastly, favorite field guides, trusty companions:

Roger Tory Peterson, Peterson Field Guides: Eastern Birds (I'm sure there are more up-to-date editions than mine). My mother recorded every bird she ever saw in her copy, and I consult this more than any other single volume in my library. Though I still haven't figured out which kind of hawk used to soar by my office window last spring...

National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies. Irresistible. The chocolate-brown butterfly with blue spots I saw on Huntington Street on March 6 was, I learned, a Diana.

A Golden Guide to Insects. "Full-color," the cover helpfully states, "Easy-to-use". No truer words were ever written. See bug, can find. And, after all, there are more of them than there are of us, so it's kind of nice to know their names.


Happy trails!

Broken Open

If you are in need of help getting through a rough time, here it is. If you are looking for the courage and resources to move on, begin anew, find your next path, I recommend this book.

In it, Elizabeth Lesser details what she calls ‘the phoenix process’—the experience of having everything around you burn down to ashes, and the shining new growth that can then occur. The re-birth, sometimes over and over, than can be needed in a healthy lifetime. Here’s help along the way.

'Whether you are in the midst of a big upheaval or riding the smaller rapids of everyday life, I want you to know that you are not alone, not now, or at any stage of the journey. Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist of the twentieth century, wrote, ‘We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.’ (p. xxiv)

Elizabeth Lesser, co-founder of the Omega Institute, is amazing. My friend Beth and I heard her speak recently at Sacred Circles, an annual spiritual and creative gathering of women at the Washington National Cathedral. It was Valentine’s Day, and the theme of the conference was ‘Love in Action’. Elizabeth said that the most valuable thing she’s learned backstage at Omega, hanging out with the luminaries she called "the wise ones", is that it’s so hard to walk the walk. She said: it’s up to me and you to walk the walk. We don’t need more prophets—we need each one of us to get prophetic and walk the walk.

Men, she pointed out, have been in charge of life on earth for the past 12,000 years—maybe even 200,000 years. We’ve made some progress- but also bungled some things terribly, hopefully not irrevocably. Women’s voices have been left out of the halls of power. If we’d been in the room, the outcomes would have been quite different. We might have talked some people to death (great laughter from the audience). But there would be a better balance of the full range of human intelligence and endeavor—heart, body, mind, soul. Most modern societies discredit emotional intelligence. Emotions are something we should keep in check—or life might be some kind of extended chick flick!

We need that better balance today. How to get there? No one is going to come and kiss us awake, Elizabeth told us. We’re going to have to rouse ourselves to action. Put your hand over your heart, she told us. Breathe in. Give a deep sigh. Pat your heart. It’s going to change the world!