“There is grandeur in this view of life,” Darwin consoled himself as his beloved daughter was dying, for he knew that death is the engine of life, that across the history of natural selection the death of the individual is what ensured the adaptation and survival of the species. And yet against this natural grandeur, we suffer the smallness of our imagination about death, as about the myriad small deaths punctuating life — the losses, the endings, the falterings of hope — forgetting somehow that every ending is a beginning in retrograde, that what may seem like a terminus may be a transformation.
Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print.)
These are the thoughts thinking themselves through me as I watch a great white heron rising from the water’s edge, from this boundary line between worlds, this lapping memory of how life emerged from non-life.
Because my bird divinations began with its great blue cousin, I cannot help but ask the majestic white bird for a message.
Combing the eleven pages of Audubon’s ornithological text about the species, I follow the usual process and let the words rearrange themselves into this koan from the unconscious:
Working on this divination, I was reminded of a long-ago counterpart — one of Mary Oliver’s least known poems, found in her 2003 collection What Do We Know (public library) and read here by 19-year-old poet, artist, and heron-lover Rose Hanzlik to the sound of Debussy’s “Reverie.”
HERON RISES FROM THE DARK, SUMMER POND by Mary Oliver
So heavy
is the long-necked, long-bodied heron,
always it is a surprise
when her smoke-colored wings
open
and she turns
from the thick water,
from the black sticks
of the summer pond,
and slowly
rises into the air
and is gone.
Then, not for the first or the last time,
I take the deep breath
of happiness, and I think
how unlikely it is
that death is a hole in the ground,
how improbable
that ascension is not possible,
though everything seems so inert, so nailed
back into itself —
the muskrat and his lumpy lodge,
the turtle,
the fallen gate.
And especially it is wonderful
that the summers are long
and the ponds so dark and so many,
and therefore it isn’t a miracle
but the common thing,
this decision,
this trailing of the long legs in the water,
this opening up of the heavy body
into a new life: see how the sudden
gray-blue sheets of her wings
strive toward the wind; see how the clasp of nothing
takes her in.
Great white heron, Holbox Island. (Available as a print.)
It takes a long time to know a person — to unbutton the costume of personality and unlace the corset of coping mechanisms in order to touch the naked soul. It is a process delicate and difficult, riven by anxiety and absolutely terrifying to both, requiring therefore great courage and great vulnerability — a process the hard-won product of which we call intimacy. “There is no terror like that of being known,” Emerson anguished in his journal while trying to navigate his deep and complicated relationship with Margaret Fuller. It is a wise terror, for it knows that there is no greater pain than the pain of intimacy severed — by betrayal, by distance, by death. To triumph over that terror in order to know and be known on the level of the naked soul is an act of faith — perhaps the greatest act of faith there is. Because all faith requires a surrender to something we cannot control, all faith begins with the anguishing anxiety that prefaces the leap.
Poet and philosopher David Whyte explores the terrifying and transcendent work of intimacy in Consolations II — the second volume of his short, splendid essays, each reckoning with the deeper meaning of some ordinary and overused word to reveal its unexamined emotional etymology. In “Intimacy,” he writes:
Intimacy is presence magnified by our vulnerability, magnified by increasing proximity to the fear that underlies that vulnerability. Intimacy and the vulnerabilities of intimacy are our constant, invisible companions, yet companions who are always wishing to make themselves visible and touchable to us, always emerging from some deep interior, to ruffle and disturb the calm surface of our well apportioned lives. Intimacy is a living force, inviting me simultaneously from the inside as much as the outside. Something calling from within that wants to meet something calling in recognition from without. Intimacy is the art and practise of living from the inside out.
[…]
Our need and our fear of intimacy is felt through an ever present almost volcanic force emerging from some unknown origin inside us, exhibiting to all and sundry, our previously hidden unspoken desires, flowing out against all efforts to the contrary, through our unconscious and conscious behaviours.
To become intimate is to become vulnerable not only to what I want and desire in my life, but to the fear I have of my desire being met.
This is the paradox of longing: Because longing can be an addiction, because no active addict ever wants to give up their addiction — or can without a great deal of suffering — it can be terrifying and almost unbearably vulnerable to surrender to an intimacy so amply fulfilling that it leaves nothing to long for. And yet in that vulnerability lies our power and our freedom to transform a relationship from a tether of dependency into a slender cord of grace.
David writes:
Intimacy cannot occur without a robust sense of vulnerability, and is tied to the sense of being pulled along in the gravitational field of any newly felt openness. In that new openness we feel as if we are pulled through the very doorway of our needs for something we desire deeply but cannot fully identify, partly because what we are about to identify is intimately connected with our own ability or inability to love.
Ultimately, he observes, intimacy is an instrument of discovery and self-discovery — a way of turning the walls between us and within us into sunlit windows through which to see and be seen:
Intimacy always carries the sense of something hidden about to be felt and known in surprising ways; something brought out and made visible, that previously could not be seen or understood. In intimacy what is hidden will become a gift, discovered and rediscovered again and again in the eyes of both giver and receiver.
[…]
To become human is to become visible, while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
Because what is visible is vulnerable, because what can be seen can be touched and what can be touched can be wounded, he adds:
Intimacy is intimately related to our sense of having been wounded, and the startling intuition that my way forward into life, or into another person’s life will be through the very doorway of the wound itself. Intimacy invites me to learn to trust the way being wounded has actually made me more available, more compassionate and possibly more intimate with the world, by being opened in ways I never realised it was possible to be open… Intimacy is always calibrated by the letting go of or the taking on of fear. Almost always our fear is experienced as an intimate invitation to understand and feel fully our particular form of wounded-ness.
[…]
Intimacy finds its ultimate expression in all the forms of surrender human beings find difficult to embrace.
The difficulty of that surrender almost always takes shape as anxiety — a word to which David devotes another of the book’s essays. Anxiety, he observes, is often an avoidance mechanism and a dissociation device — “a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for… a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new understanding of ourselves, so that “we learn that what we thought we knew is not equal to what we are discovering… that who we thought we were is not who we are now.”
By allowing true intimacy on the smallest scale of personal love — the bond between one and one — we open into the largest scale of belonging, into cohesion with what Margaret Fuller, inspired by Goethe, called the All. David writes:
The need for intimacy in a human life and in a human social life is as foundational as our daily hunger and our never ending thirst, and needs to be met in just the same practical way, every day, just as necessarily and just as frequently: in touch, in conversation, in listening and in seeing, in the back and forth of ideas; intimate exchanges that say I am here and you are here and that by touching our bodies, our minds or our shared work in the world, we make a world together… Intimacy is our evolutionary inheritance, the internal force that has us returning to another and to the world from our insulated aloneness again and again, no matter our difficulties and no matter our wounds.
We live in a state of perpetual dissociation from the almost unbearable wonder of being alive. Wonder is always an edge state, its edge so sharp it threatens to rupture the mundane and sever us from what we mistake for reality — the TV, the townhouse, the trauma narrative. If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars — a particular star in the infant universe that made this particular body to sinew this particular soul across billions and billions of blind steps each one of which could have gone otherwise — we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are.
Azita Ardakani offers a lyrical antidote to this self-expatriation from our cosmic inheritance in this breathtaking piece she has kindly let me publish on The Marginalian — part poem and part lullaby, part compact history of science and part creation myth, radiating the revelatory simplicity of a children’s book and the causal complexity of a cosmogony.
Azita writes:
Once upon a time,
In a place far far away,
The darkness drifted.
The darkness knew no time.
Reaching for infinity, only knowing beyond.
One day in the web of inky forever, it asked itself, can I see you?
It waited, and waited, and then, answered, a star.
And then another, and another, and, another.
Another was where it began,
and as the star beings asked to be born to meet the darkness from which they came, one particular planet created water so it too could reflect the stars back to themselves.
The stars seeing their reflection were filled with joy and delight.
Curiosity was born in their light millions of years away.
One by one they made their way down, to touch the ocean, to see themselves.
The soil darkness watched with awe as the stars arrived,
A heart’s desire asked: Can I see you closer?
The water stars stretched onto the soil, and mixed into the clay, and became,
everything.
Yes you too, coyote who hears this, wise owl, mouse and rabbit, you too sleeping fawn, you too tree and root and seed, you too nested flight, and you too, sitting two legged.
Mixed from clay and star, flesh and life, a hollow canal opened so breath too could reach back to the darkness.
Missing the beginning, it exhaled a bridge, home.
The star water became everything we know, and you? The story of us?
Well, to experience the closest thing to the very beginning of star meeting water, we learned to create a small ocean inside of us, where it could all be felt, all over again.
Once upon a time, in a place far far away, the darkness drifted, and you drifted inside it.
You were the wish you once wished for.
Art by Derek Dominic D’souza from Song of Two Worlds by physicist Alan Lightman
The great problem of consciousness is that all it knows is itself, and only dimly. We can override this elemental self-reference only with constant vigilance, reminding ourselves again and again as we forget over and over how difficult it is — how nigh impossible — to know what it is like to be anybody else. It does not come naturally to us, this recognition that every other consciousness is a different operating system governed by different needs and different responses to the same situations, encoded by different formative experiences. This is why the Golden Rule, a version of which is appears in all major spiritual and ethical traditions, may be the most narcissistic of our moral codes, with its assumption that others want done unto them the same things we ourselves want. One measure of love — perhaps the greatest measure — may be the understanding that another’s needs, as incomprehensible as they may appear to us and as orthogonal to our own, are a fundamental part of who they are; that to love someone is to love whatever they need to be their fullest, truest self rather than a projection of who we imagine or desire them to be.
The story, illustrated with great vivacity and typographic virtuosity by artist, dancer, choreographer, and theater director Remy Charlip (January 10, 1929–August 14, 2012), begins with a boy declaring ownership of his cat, in that classic “MINE!” way that children have of feeling out the boundary between where they end and the rest of the world begins — a boundary we spend our lives trying to locate as ever-changing selves moving through an ever-changing world, trying to discern the contours of belonging.
“Come up on my lap and have a little nap,” the boy commands the cat, who looks in no mood for a nap on a lap. Page after page, we see the boy treat the cat as his plaything — dressing the cat in a sweater, putting the cat in a stroller, tucking the cat into a crib — until the forbearing cat finally has it and claws out the sweater, leaps from under the blanket, breaks out of the bed, breaking the bed.
With the fury of a dispossessed tyrant that so readily comes to children (and to the petulant child nested in every maturity), the boy roars an indignant declaration of ownership at the cat, who gently sings back the fundamental dignity of personhood.
In consonance with Alan Watt’s prescription for how to become who you truly are, in which he insisted that “Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others,” the cat’s outpouring of self-possession undams the boy’s own.
In the end, the boy discovers what we all must eventually, if we are to grow into the full bigness of the heart: that in every relationship of trust and tenderness, each is the guardian of the other’s particularity; that to love someone not for the comfort or compliance they can give you but for exactly who they are, the special and particular person, is the greatest, the only kind of love; that it is impossible to achieve this without first learning to love yourself for exactly who you are, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires — for, as e.e. cummings so memorably wrote, “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” Or any cat can fight. The story ends with the companionable quietude of boy and cat coming to rest in their parallel particularities — that supreme measure of a healthy bond.
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