Just the Insects and Me

I recently took a week off of work for some downtime. There was a lot of sitting around being lazy. The highlight was a day by myself in the Kansas Flint Hills. Just the insects and me. A bit of wind, the occasional bird, and some bison. I didn't see another person for well over six hours and even got away from road noise and other background evidence of people once I hiked away from the parking and buildings. I had to work hard, but I found a day of real isolation. It was exquisite.

And beautiful.

I went to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, maintained the National Park Service. It's a rolling landscape, though just a step above flat. "Hills" only from a Kansas perspective. I have a feeling many would consider it featureless and boring.

That dialogue-as-meme came across my feed last month sometime:

Just saw someone say online that they've never seen mountains in real life and lost my mind. Is this an experience you guys have had? Are there some people who havent seen mountains?

I've never seen mountains. But I live on and island and I lose my mind when people tell me they've never seen the ocean. The ocean. Some people have never seen the ocean before.

What really gets me is that some people have never seen either.

Kansas is not meant for permanent habitation.

Kansas is not meant for permanent habitation.

While I do love the sense of awe I get from both mountains and ocean, I also love the relative plainness of Kansas. I love that the beauty doesn't just smack you in the face, that the landscape trains you to find the beauty in apparent absence. You learn to appreciate the subtle, mundane beauty that is always there in everything, not just in the grand and eye-catching. You don't take it for granted or get desensitized to it. Beauty is everywhere if you know how to see it. Kansas teaches you to.

A poem:

How I Go to the Woods

Ordinarily, I go to the woods alone, with not a single

friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore

unsuitable.

I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirds

or hugging the old black oak tree. I have my way of

praying, as you no doubt have yours.

Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit

on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds,

until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost

unhearable sound of the roses singing.

 * * *

If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love

you very much.

For months I've sprinkled these posts with poems by Mary Oliver. That's because I've been slowly working my through her collection Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. I've finally finished, so a review:

This is a difficult book to rate. To start, Oliver is a superb poet and I loved many of the poems in this collection. She gets five stars, as do those selections. However, this is a big, thick volume with highlights from a long, productive career--and I found I could only read a few pages at a time because there is too much sameness to the selections. I couldn't maintain my focus. And, really, the brightest moments throughout were those that veered from her overriding poetic topic, that of wondrous encounters with nature. Experiences and emotions related to observing the natural world. Oliver is gifted at conveying the sense of awe and connection in those moments. Yet I found myself most moved when she allowed other, less joyful thoughts to interact with them. Those poems were more poignant and complex and, to me, more meaningful. But I was speaking of my rating--because the majority of the collection lacked that spark, my reading experience was more often three stars than five--so I'll average the two to a four.

And my favorite selections that I haven't already shared.

Just Lying on the Grass at Blackwater

I think sometimes of the possible glamour of death--

that it might be wonderful to be

lost and happy inside the green grass--

or to be the green grass!--

or, maybe the pink rose, or the blue iris,

or the affable daisy, or the twirled vine

looping its way skyward--that I might be perfectly peaceful

to be the shining lake, or the hurrying, athletic river,

or the dark shoulders of the trees

where the thrush each evening weeps himself into an ecstasy.

I lie down in the fields of goldenrod, and everlasting.

Who could find me?

My thoughts simplify. I have not done a thousand things

or a hundred things but, perhaps, a few.

As for wondering about answers that are not available except

in books, though all my childhood I was sent there

to find them, I have learned

to leave all that behind

as in summer I take off my shoes and my socks,

my jacket, my hat, and go on

happier, through the fields. The little sparrow

with the pink beak

calls out, over and over, so simply--not to me

but to the whole world. All afternoon

I grow wiser, listening to him,

soft, small, nameless fellow at the top of some weed,

enjoying his life. If you can sing, do it. If not,

even silence can feel, to the world, like happiness,

like praise,

from the pool of shade you have found beneath the everlasting.

Rice

It grew in the black mud.

It grew under the tiger’s orange paws.

Its stems thicker than candles, and as straight.

Its leaves like the feathers of egrets, but green.

The grains cresting, wanting to burst.

Oh, blood of the tiger.

I don’t want you to just sit at the table.

I don’t want you just to eat, and be content.

I want you to walk into the fields

Where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.

I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.

I want you to fill your hands with mud, like a blessing.

The Kookaburras

In every heart there is a coward and a procrastinator.

In every heart there is a god of flowers, just waiting

to stride out of a cloud and lift its wings.

The kookaburras, pressed against the edge of their cage,

asked me to open the door.

Years later I remember how I didn't do it,

how instead I walked away.

They had the brown eyes of soft-hearted dogs.

They didn't want to do anything so extraordinary, only to fly

home to their river.

By now I suppose the great darkness has covered them.

As for myself, I am not yet a god of even the palest flowers.

Nothing else has changed either.

Someone tosses their white bones to the dung-heap.

The sun shines on the latch of their cage.

I lie in the dark, my heart pounding.

One or Two Things

1.

Don't bother me.

I've just

been born.

2.

The butterfly's loping flight

carries it through the country of the leaves

delicately, and well enough to get it

where it wants to go, wherever that is, stopping

here and there to fuzzle the damp throats

of flowers and the black mud; up

and down it swings, frenzied and aimless; and sometimes

for long delicious moments it is perfectly

lazy, riding motionless in the breeze on the soft stalk

of some ordinary flower.

3.

The god of dirt

came up to me many times and said

so many wise and delectable things, I lay

on the grass listening

to his dog voice,

crow voice,

frog voice; now,

he said, and now,

and never once mentioned forever,

4.

which has nevertheless always been,

like a sharp iron hoof,

at the center of my mind.

5.

One or two things are all you need

to travel over the blue pond, over the deep

roughage of the trees and through the stiff

flowers of lightning--some deep

memory of pleasure, some cutting

knowledge of pain.

6.

But to lift the hoof!

For that you need an idea.

7.

For years and years I struggled

just to love my life.  And then

the butterfly

rose, weightless, in the wind.

"Don't love your life

too much," it said,

and vanished

into the world.

The Swimming Lesson

Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves

Reaching around my life, I moved my arms

And coughed, and in the end saw land.

Somebody, I suppose,

Remembering the medieval maxim,

Had tossed me in,

Had wanted me to learn to swim,

Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back

From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,

Ever learned anything at all

About swimming, but only

How to put off, one by one,

Dreams and pity, love and grace, –

How to survive in any place.

Flare

1.

Welcome to the silly, comforting poem.

It is not the sunrise,

which is a red rinse,

which is flaring all over the eastern sky;

it is not the rain falling out of the purse of God;

it is not the blue helmet of the sky afterward,

or the trees, or the beetle burrowing into the earth;

it is not the mockingbird who, in his own cadence,

will go on sizzling and clapping

from the branches of the catalpa that are thick with blossoms,

   that are billowing and shining,

      that are shaking in the wind.

2.

    You still recall, sometimes, the old barn on your great-grandfather’s farm, a place you visited once, and went into, all alone, while the grownups sat and talked in the house.

    It was empty, or almost. Wisps of hay covered the floor, and some wasps sang at the windows, and maybe there was a strange fluttering bird high above, disturbed, hoo-ing a little and staring down from a messy ledge with wild, binocular eyes.

    Mostly, though, it smelled of milk, and the patience of animals; the give-offs of the body were still in the air, a vague ammonia, not unpleasant.

    Mostly, though, it was restful and secret, the roof high up and arched, the boards unpainted and plain.

    You could have stayed there forever, a small child in a corner, on the last raft of hay, dazzled by so much space that seemed empty, but wasn’t.

    Then--you still remember--you felt the rap of hunger--it was noon--and you turned from that twilight dream and hurried back to the house, where the table was set, where an uncle patted you on the shoulder for welcome, and there was your place at the table.

3.

Nothing lasts.

There is a graveyard where everything I am talking about is,

now.

I stood there once, on the green grass, scattering flowers.

4.

Nothing is so delicate or so finely hinged as the wings

of the green moth

against the lantern

against its heat

against the beak of the crow

in the early morning.

Yet the moth has trim, and feistiness, and not a drop

    of self-pity.

Not in this world.

5.

My mother

was the blue wisteria,

my mother

was the mossy stream out behind the house,

my mother, alas, alas,

did not always love her life,

heavier than iron it was

as she carried it in her arms, from room to room,

oh, unforgettable!

I bury her

in a box

in the earth

and turn away.

My father

was a demon of frustrated dreams,

was a breaker of trust,

was a poor, thin boy with bad luck.

He followed God, there being no one else

he could talk to;

he swaggered before God, there being no one else

who would listen.

Listen,

this was his life.

I bury it in the earth.

I sweep the closets.

I leave the house.

6.

I mention them now,

I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love

nor lack of sorrow.

But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them--one, two, three, four--the kiss of courtesy,

    of sweet thanks,

of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.

May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

I will not give them the responsibility for my life.

7.

Did you know that the ant has a tongue

with which to gather in all that it can

of sweetness?

Did you know that?

8.

The poem is not the world.

It isn’t even the first page of the world.

But the poem wants to flower, like a flower.

It knows that much.

It wants to open itself,

like the door of a little temple,

so that you might step inside and be cooled and refreshed,

and less yourself than part of everything.

9.

The voice of the child crying out of the mouth of the

    grown woman

is a misery and a disappointment.

The voice of the child howling out of the tall, bearded,

    muscular man

is a misery, and a terror.

10.

Therefore, tell me:

what will engage you?

What will open the dark fields of your mind,

    like a lover

        at first touching?

11.

Anyway,

there was no barn.

No child in the barn.

No uncle no table no kitchen.

Only a long lovely field full of bobolinks.

12.

When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider

the orderliness of the world. Notice

something you have never noticed before,

like the tambourine sound of the snow-cricket

whose pale green body is no longer than your thumb.

Stare hard at the hummingbird, in the summer rain,

shaking the water-sparks from its wings.

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also,

    like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world

and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

In the glare of your mind, be modest.

And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.

Live with the beetle, and the wind.

This is the dark bread of the poem.

This is the dark and nourishing bread of the poem.

I've been short of words lately, especially in writing, so don't have as much as usual to share. Here's an article:

Is the Universe Controlled by Gigantic Structures?

Solidity is a function of magnification. We know that anything we experience as solid is actually a structure of atoms packed closely enough that to our eyes they appear to be a single solid thing. If we were small enough, we’d see the spaces between them; if we were even smaller, those spaces might seem vast. Likewise, in 1989 Margaret Geller and John Huchra, analyzing redraft survey data, discovered the immense “Great Wall,” a “sheet” formed from galaxies many light years apart. That first large-scale structure is 500 million light-years long, 200 million light years wide, and with a thickness of 15 million light years.

Other gigantic large-scale structures been discovered since — sheets, filaments, and knots, with bubble-like voids intersperse among them. They appear to be connected by clouds and filaments of hydrogen gas and dark matter. Though the bodies that comprise the structures are not gravitationally bound to each other — the distances between them are too great — evidence is piling up that they are linked by something.

I find the possibility fascinating. As I wrote in The Acme of Evolution:

I've long had vague, uniformed thoughts about how a close-up view of our current understanding of particle physics looks awfully similar to our view of the universe; all these physical bodies orbiting and swirling around each other, that the microscopic and the immense don't seem all that different but for scale. Each speck of dust could be a galaxy, the complexity and shape and relationships seem so similar. The universe is made of galaxies made of galaxies made of galaxies, on and on infinitely into each microparticle everywhere.

I think those ideas had their genesis in my reading of Horton Hears a Who when I was young. "A person's a person, no matter how small." . . . 

It's just a matter of scale.

I'm short of words, so here's one from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Ozurie

feeling torn between the life you want and the life you have

Consider Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, sitting up in her bed at the end of the movie. While the credits roll and the music swells, with the Land of Oz still fading from her eyes, she whispers to herself, “There’s no place like home.”

Eventually, of course, she knows she’ll have to get out of bed, put on a pair of ordinary black slippers, and carry on with her life on the farm. Counting the chicks, darning the stockings, pushing gray eggs around a cast-iron pan. She’ll play around with Toto, just as she did before. And when she opens the door, she’ll step out into a world of black and white, into a broad sweep of flat land that reaches the edge of the sky in all directions. And she’ll know that she’s not in Oz anymore. She had her rumspringa and chose to return, which means she is now a confirmed Kansan.

And yet, even as she makes her way to school the next morning, she now carries with her a certain unshakable awareness—that her gray gingham dress is secretly blue, that her charcoal hair is actually a rich auburn, that the sky catches fire when the sun goes down. She’ll try to blink the colors out of her eyes, but she’ll never be able to forget that there’s an entire dimension hidden inside things. Everything will now have a grainy reticence that feels intolerable to her. She knows that this humdrum workaday world can explode without warning, blooming with color and potential and chaos. She alone can sense the shimmer of gold on the gray gravel road, the lion’s roar hidden in a friend’s voice. She will feel a new dissatisfaction with surfaces and distances, feel the urge to yank open the curtains and rip into people’s hearts and set them on fire, just to get a sense of what they’re made of.

To her, Oz is more than a dream. It’s a sickness. A feverish desire that infected her mind, making normal life feel intolerable, when she had been doing just fine. But where does she go from here? How long will it be before she’s gazing over the rainbow once again? How long before she’s galloping across the fields like a storm chaser, beckoning her arms to the clouds like a toddler desperate to be picked up?

And even if she gets her wish, and wakes up back in Oz as if no time had passed—what then? How long before she’s clicking her heels on the sidewalks of Emerald City, trying to flag down a hot air balloon to take her back to the comfort and safety of home? If Oz is a dream that never leaves you, so is Kansas. Life is not a flat and barren outpost, and it’s not a bangarang wonderland either. Maybe they’re just two different ways of looking at some ambiguous middle place, where she actually lives. It’s just a question of perspective, which can shift wildly depending on how she chooses to see it.

Such is life. Some days you wake up in Kansas, and some days in Oz. Sometimes the world feels pretty much stuck in place, and you’ve made your peace with that. Why waste time on silly pipe dreams, when there are socks to darn and pigs to feed? At other times, you look around and see how exciting the world can be, how flexible and arbitrary things are, how easy it might be to cast aside your old life and get to work building the one you really want.

Eventually you have to decide what to do with this desire. Do you tamp it down in yourself, or do you chase after it? Should you quit your job to pursue your dream, or hang on to that steady paycheck? Stay in an okay relationship or find a better match? Do you plunge into a Technicolor riot of what might be, harsh and delirious and confusing? Or do you accept the humble beauty of ordinary life, where nothing ever changes, and everything is simple? Which will it be—Kansas or Oz? Life as it is or life as it could be?

Soon enough, life will offer you an answer. But for the moment, you are like Dorothy, sitting up in her bed, trying to decide which pair of slippers she wants to wear today. Black or ruby? Black or ruby? Until she decides, she’ll be caught in a maddening state of tension, trying to live in two worlds at once—padding around the farmhouse as it spins inside the twister, with rubies shining in her bloodstream, her auburn hair slowly turning gray.

Spare a thought for poor Dorothy, the orphan girl of Kansas, who dreams in color but lives in black and white.

From Oz + the prairie, with you caught somewhere in between. Pronounced “oz-you-ree” or “ozh-uh- ree.

Thinking of the plainness of plains brings to mind the book The Land by Gerald Murnane. One of the things I wrote about it in A Glossary of Enchantment: Or, Wonder Is an Essential Survival Skill:

The titular plains--of inner Australia--serve as an allegory for the inevitable failure of artistic expression. How their very plainness allows the beauty of small, mundane details to stand out at the same time that their vastness implies an intangible, distant, unknown something more. Meaning is both exquisitely perceived and simultaneously impossible to perceive.

Only tangentially related to my thoughts at the top of this post, but still.

The plains teach you to find beauty in apparent absence, to appreciate the subtle, mundane beauty that is always there in everything.