Sunday, November 6, 2016

Revisiting smallness



We're in the midst of a cruel fall drought here, and until yesterday it was enhanced by weirdly summer-like heat. The temperatures have eased a little, but it still feels as if this will be the year without an autumn. The colors are muted, the dust heavy. There are no glorious leaves in flame, and those moody, mild gray days—soft with light rain and so perfect for walking and thinking—are AWOL. This somehow seems in keeping with the grim news out in the world. It's a cruel year all around.

This dry season has reminded me of a much worse one that hit us in the summer of 2007, when the drought combined with extraordinary heat. That, too, was a year when people kept saying, "I can't remember anything like this," and there was an ominous feeling that something was not quite right with the planet. Europe had its own heatwave that year, and there were terrible wildfires in Greece. And, of course, there was also correspondingly grim news directly created by humans. When is there not?

At the end of that terrible summer of 2007, the editor at the Nashville Scene asked me to write an essay about the coming fall. I hadn't given that piece a thought in a long time, but this year's crappy autumn made me curious to go back and reread it. I was surprised to see how much it echoed, in less mystical language, the quotation I posted last week from Robinson Jeffers — a passage I'd never read until shortly before I posted it. I knew Jeffers had a big influence on me (see the title of this blog), but I was a little startled to see the direct parallel.

Jeffers's aggressive anti-humanism, or what some call misanthropy, has become more problematic for me as I've gotten older. I have less and less use for rage, and there's no denying the rage bubbling underneath much of his work. And yet at the core of his vision there is, as he says, peace, freedom, and great, transcendent beauty. That's also what I find when I try to look beyond human concerns. In my essay for the Scene, I wrote:

Jettisoning our idea of ourselves as masters of our domain may not be very gratifying to the ego, but it frees us to interact with nature in the most intimate way. We can look at a spider web and really see it, without analyzing its architectural impressiveness or recoiling from its “ick, a bug” factor. It simply is at that moment. We can experience it as a manifestation of life on earth, not greater or less than ourselves—in fact, not separable from ourselves. When we put aside our expectations, and yes, even our sense of responsibility, then we can truly understand our very small place in the universe.

In a time of turmoil, climatic and otherwise, I find my smallness very comforting. You can read the rest of my piece, "Fall Disclosure," here.


Photo by BitterGrace, taken on October 24, 2016


Wednesday, November 2, 2016

"here is peace, freedom"


"I believe that the Universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one's affection outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one's self, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions — the world of spirits.

I think that it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him." 

~ Robinson Jeffers, from a letter to Sister Mary James Power, October 1, 1934

Photo by BitterGrace