The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

By Maria Popova

The Great Blue Heron, Signs vs. Omens, and Our Search for Meaning

One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend’s dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.

It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.

A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Jarod Anderson also turns to the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning in Something in the Woods Loves You (public library) — his poignant meditation on surviving the darkest recesses of human nature, the strange fusion of shame and sadness that gives depression its devastating power, by turning to the luminous and numinous in nature. Emerging from the pages is a lyrical love letter to how “imaginative empathy” heals and harmonizes our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the wonder of being alive.

Reflecting on the difficulty of interpreting his own life and on the myriad symbologies of the great blue heron — among them an ancient myth in which the bird dusts the surface of the water with golden starlight to attract bluegill — Anderson writes:

The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That’s how meaning works. It’s a subjective act of interpretation.

You might get the impression that I’m saying herons are meaningless, but that’s not what I’m saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.

[…]

The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.

Whenever we think in absolutes, we ossify. Our freedom always lies in our flexibility, and because concepts like meaning and identity are not fixed, because, as Anderson observes, they “require our intentional participation,” they are “mercifully flexible.” They take the shape of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve, they abide by the messages we send ourselves through the omens we make of reality.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Watching the herons walking his local shoreline, feeling like they are sending him “an overt message” about the power of “quiet contemplation and self-determination,” Anderson writes:

The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn’t diminish the heron’s power. It simply highlights my own.

There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment — these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.

For those of us who find consolation in the natural world, the sense of meaning has to do with contacting the numinous quality of sea and sky and songbird, of everything that makes this planet a world. You may call that contact wonder. You may call it magic. “If you don’t think herons are magic,” Anderson writes, “you need to broaden your definition of that word.”

My local heron, the mystic. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

Looking back on the bleak period when depression swept away the herons from the sky of his mind and voided the world of wonder, he reflects:

There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water’s surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.

Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn’t a dismissal of what is real. It’s a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.

In the remainder of Something in the Woods Loves You, Anderson goes on to lens the search for meaning through a kaleidoscope of living wonders, from the sugar maple to the red-tailed hawk to the morel mushroom. Couple it with Loren Eiseley on warblers as a lens on the wonder of being, then revisit some of humanity’s greatest writers on nature as an antidote to depression and Terry Tempest Williams on the bird in the heart.

BP

The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest Form of Faith

By Maria Popova

The Shape of Wonder: N.J. Berrill on the Universe, the Deepest Meaning of Beauty, and the Highest Form of Faith

Looking back on her trailblazing work, which confirmed the existence of dark matter, astronomer Vera Rubin reflected: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.”

Far from a mere diversion of the senses, beauty may just be the dialogue between nature and human nature — our most expressive language for loving the universe, for loving ourselves as fractals of the universe, for living wonder-smitten by reality. To find something beautiful is to find it interesting and meaningful in some way, often a way we can’t articulate — to render it significant and worthy of attention, to render it a wonder. In all of its forms — the beauty of a willow at night, the beauty of a noble act, the beauty of the imperfect face you love — beauty is what we find and what we create as we move through the world at our most fully human.

In 1955, the English marine biologist and poetic science writer N.J. Berrill (April 28, 1903–October 16, 1996) worked out the ideas that would later bloom into his perspectival masterpiece You and the Universe on the pages of another book. Despite a title very much a product of its time — a time before Ursula K. Le Guin so brilliant unsexed the universal pronoun — Man’s Emerging Mind (public library) remains a singular and enduring reckoning with what makes us human, lensed through the majesty and mystery of beauty in all its forms, which pulsates beneath those qualities of mind we associate with terms like soul and spirit.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

Aware of himself as an individual unique in the history of a universe he doesn’t fully understand yet living with questions common to “all of us who move and think and feel and whom time consumes,” Berrill writes in the twenty-first chapter, wonderfully titled “The Shape of Wonder”:

I know beauty but I do not know what it means. Keats said that beauty is truth and so did the Greeks, although the one was concerned with loveliness and the others mainly with intellect. I do know that whatever beauty is, whether it is the kind that is woven within the mind itself or is perceived without, on this earth only the human mind can sense it… And inasmuch as we ourselves, in body, brain or mind, are as integral a part of the universe as any star, it makes little difference whether we say beauty lies only in the mind of the beholder or otherwise. We, each of us, you and I, exhibit more of the true nature of the universe than any dead Saturn or Jupiter.

With an eye to the creative impulse that is part of our humanity, part of the true nature of the universe that we refract, he echoes poet Robinson Jeffers’s moving meditation on moral beauty and adds:

Somehow, as our brains have grown beyond a certain complexity and size, beauty emerged both as perception and as creation. We know it when we meet it and we create it when we can. And we know it in many forms and not only in sublimated senses — we know it when love becomes selfless and solicitude becomes compassion. We see it in moral stature and in hope and courage. We see it whenever the transcending quality of growth is clear and unmistakable, knowing that only in such growth do we find our own individual happiness.

Berrill considers one thing beauty shares with love (which both share with the first of William James’s four features of transcendent experiences):

We can express them with words but cannot define them — we can only say that this and this are included but that is not, and wordlessly we all recognise the truth of it. Speech is limited, no matter what the language…. For in our hearts we understand more than we can possibly talk about.

A century after Walt Whitman called himself a “kosmos” and insisted that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” Berrill intimates that this ineffable knowledge is a way of knowing ourselves, of anchoring ourselves to time and meaning as we evolve over the course of a lifetime and face our finitude. In consonance with Annie Dillard’s piercing insistence that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” he writes:

Your day’s activity, mental and physical, is a part of you and by extension you are all that you have ever been — like an unfinished symphony.

[…]

I believe… that during the closing notes of an individual life the question, if any, should be not do I have an immortal soul and what comes next, but how much of a soul have I grown? Whether individual consciousness persists at all… all that lives, all that has lived, retains its value and its meaning… I believe the past lives, that the present is eternal, and the future immanent; that we take it as an indivisible whole and that our obsession with the sweep and drama of history, our probing with fossils and other symbols of time, and our efforts to constructs theories of evolution of life and matter, are all in keeping with the craving to recreate in the human mind the unity of the universe in all its dimensions. The fact that we are so concerned and make such attempts to do this is much more significant than the results we may obtain. Space and time unite in the mind, in the organism, and in the universe as one all-inclusive whole.

Art by Ofra Amit for The Universe in Verse

It is with this awareness that the Nobel-winning quantum pioneer Erwin Schrödinger made his koan-like deathbed insistence that “this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.” Beauty, Berrill suggests, is how we rise out of our transient individual lives to contact this transcendent wholeness, to trust it and thus to trust ourselves. As such, it is a form of faith — the faith we most need to fully inhabit our lives, entwined as they are in that “inescapable network of mutuality.”

Berrill writes:

We need faith, a faith in ourselves as human beings and not as members of this or that race or religion or state or class of society. We need no faith in supernatural forces. We need only to recognise that our knowledge of the universe through our senses and our knowledge of the universe through our own inward nature show that it is orderly, moral and beautiful, that it is akin to intelligence, that love and hope belong in it as fully as light itself, and that the power and will of the human mind is but a symptom of reality; that we, when we are most human, most rational, most aware of love and beauty, reflect and represent the spirit of the universe. That should be enough.

And isn’t the sense of enough the triumph of life?

BP

The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

By Maria Popova

The Paradox of Joy, with a Nick Cave Song and a Lisel Mueller Poem

In this world heavy with robust reasons for despair, joy is a stubborn courage we must not surrender, a fulcrum of personal power we must not yield to cynicism, blame, or any other costume of helplessness. “Experience of conflict and a load of suffering has taught me that what matters above all is to celebrate joy,” René Magritte wrote just after living through the second World War of his lifetime. “Life is wasted when we make it more terrifying, precisely because it is so easy to do so.” And when the war within rages, as it does in every life, the practice of joy, the courage of joy, becomes our mightiest frontier of resistance. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked,” Kahlil Gibran observed in one of his prophetic poems. This paradox remains one of the 17 most important things I have learned about life.

Nick Cave, who has lived through some unimaginable loss, brought the paradox of joy to the 300th edition of his wonderful journal The Red Hand Files — an oasis of largehearted anticynicism in our world, and my favorite email by orders of magnitude. He writes:

I have a full life. A privileged life. An unendangered life. But sometimes the simple joys escape me. Joy is not always a feeling that is freely bestowed upon us, often it is something we must actively seek. In a way, joy is a decision, an action, even a practised method of being. It is an earned thing brought into focus by what we have lost — at least, it can seem that way.

This paradox comes alive in Nick’s song “Joy” from his altogether soul-slaking record Wild God. “We’ve all had too much sorrow — now is the time for joy,” goes a lyric spoken by the ghost of his dead son.

Some time ago, amid a season of suffering, Nick introduced me to the soulful work of poet Christian Wiman and sent me his lifeline of an anthology Joy: 100 Poems (public library) — a kaleidoscopic lens on, as Wiman writes in the introduction, “why a moment of joy can blast you right out of the life to which it makes you all the more lovingly and tenaciously attached, or why this lift into pure bliss might also entail a steep drop of concomitant loss.”

Among the hundred poems, as various as Gertrude Stein and Lucille Clifton, is the plainly and pointedly titled “Joy” by one of my favorite poets: Lisel Mueller, who lived nearly a century and wrote with such ravishing poignancy about the consolations of mortality and the dazzling complexities that make life worth living.

JOY
by Lisel Mueller

“Don’t cry, it’s only music,”
someone’s voice is saying.
“No one you love is dying.”

It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
“Crazy,” she told herself,
“I should be dancing with happiness.”

But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love —
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.
Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.

Couple with Nick’s beautiful of reading of “But We Had Music,” then revisit poet Ross Gay on delight as a force of resistance.

BP

Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown

By Maria Popova

Making Space: An Illustrated Ode to the Art of Welcoming the Unknown

It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettling the foundation of our illusion of control (which is always the opposite of faith).

Italian writer Paola Quintavalle and artist Miguel Tanco offer a lovely antidote to our unease about this essential creative and contemplative act in Making Space (public library) — a charming illustrated taxonomy of the many forms of this existential exhale, the many ways we can deepen and magnify life by giving things beyond our control the time and space they take.

There is making space “to plant a seed and watch it grow,” space “for taking a chance” and “for another try,” space “for a hand to hold and when it’s time, for letting go.”

Children hold vigil over a dead bird, making space “for those who are no longer here.” A boy with a party hat and a mouthful of cake encircled by angry peers in party hats becomes an emblem of “the truth stuck inside your mouth.” A constellation of little cosmonauts make space “to wonder why.”

Page by page, there emerges a growing awareness that making space is really about our relationship to time and the unknown — that it is intimately related to learning how to wait better, that it is a laboratory for the paradoxes and possibilities of change, that it is where we come to terms with our necessary losses. (“Longing is like the Seed,” Emily Dickinson wrote, beholden to “the Hour, and the Zone, / Each Circumstance unknown.”)

Couple Making Space with Pablo Neruda’s beautiful poem “Keeping Quiet,” then revisit 200 years of beloved writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude, that supreme act of making space.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books

BP

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