The great mercy of life is that we can change, we can reroute, we can surprise ourselves. The great pitfall of prediction is that, mercifully, we are unpredictable.

—
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. This is the paradox we live with: We crave certainty, only to discover over and over that it is a mirage, that the love of life is rooted in the courage of uncertainty — because certainty doesn’t allow for surprise, but everything we know of life is the product of the wildest bet that prevailed against the odds of otherwise so we may exist; because certainty thrives on clear category and neat classification, but the most meaningful experiences we have inhabit the liminal spaces between the common categories of what we can name.

NASA engineer Lisa Rosenberg offers a lovely ode to the life-force of uncertainty in the title poem from her altogether ravishing collection Weeds and Stars (public library) — the finest reverie of reality since Diane Ackerman’s The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, with the feeling-tone of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the sensibility of astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe:

WEEDS AND STARS
by Lisa Rosenberg

Weeds and stars and everything between,
from ocean dwellers to accretion disks —
resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented —
recall the transience of clouds.

The ocean dwellers and accretion disks,
the finest river stones and faintest moons
recall the transience of clouds,
of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.

The faintest moon, the finest river stone,
the lucid silences at play in dreams
find harmony at work in gorgeous noise.
Let night and day be open quandaries

in play with silences and lucid dreams.
Forget the cries for certainty, the heft
of night and day and open quandaries,
the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.

The case for certainty forgets the weft
of wholes, of fragments and resiliency,
imperfect music of imperfect spheres,
the weediest of stars, the in-betweens.

In our yearning for certainty, we have tried to reduce the cosmos to clockwork, to side with probability over surprise, and yet again and again it is the break in the pattern, the chaos in the order, that creates the conditions for possibility. The most brutal benediction of life is that every experience is unrepeatable, every organism irreplicable, every existence a singular phenomenon that has never before occurred and will never again occur in the entire history and future of the universe — something Rosenberg channels in another poem from the book, reverencing the most poetic of numbers:

PRAISE ON PI DAY
by Lisa Rosenberg

To praise the nonrepeating, I will praise
the universe: each smooth circumference,
each jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere you look.

The universe, each smooth circumference
of our daily mess, won’t fit in simple bins
of life and not-life. They’re everywhere
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not

our daily mess, unfit for simple bins,
but each repeated lesson learned anew
and elsewhere, too. What surprises us is not
that we forget, but that our learning shifts

with each repeated lesson learned anew.
The aster blooms. The supernova cools.
We might forget that all our learning shifts
into the pupil of the coming day.

The aster blooms. The supernova cools
its jagged fit and fractal-sculpted face
into the pupil of a coming day
where praise is nonrepeating, and we praise.

Couple with another poem of praise for the improbable, then revisit The Universe in Verse.