Nothing increases life – in the proper sense of the word, based on the Latin “to make great, to glorify” – more than the act of being aware of your details, and nothing is more sanctifying: Kneeling to look at the sleeping person is an act of devotion. We bless our lives by seeing and honoring the details, the little miracles that make this impossible world what it is. And yet consciousness arose to filter them, to blur them into vague images that we could describe, to save us from being struck by surprise by the flickering morning light on the edge of the kitchen sink and the glowing eye of the house plane to get on with our days. Psychologists know this necessary disease: “Right now, you lose most of what's going on around you,” wrote Alexandra Horowitz in one of my favorite books, examining the “willful, unapologetic racist” of attention. Poets know the solution: “Attention without feeling,” writes Mary Oliver, “is mere report.”
Attention, then, is our primary tool for loving the world, adhering to Iris Murdoch's definition of love as “the acute awareness that something outside of yourself is real.” But because there is nothing invisible that is real outside of mathematics, because love is made specific and certain, loving anything – a person, the planet, your life – is a conscious practice, which is always a devotional practice.
In Comfort of the Crows: The Year of the Past (public library), Margaret Renkl recounts her respect for truth in all seasons through small acts of attention to the wind and the wren, the hemlock and the hawk, which together reveal the beauty of life. Part between Henry Beston Outhouse and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Gathering Mosswhat emerges is an invitation to transcend the mindless inertia we bring to our days and pause to notice details as a kind of thought practice that expands the world.
He opens with a guided audio under the gentle title “Wherever You Are, Stop What You're Doing”:
Stop and look at the tangled roots of poison ivy climbing up a locust tree. Notice how they twist like braids in a golden braid, like seaweed washed up on a beach…
Stop and think about the skeleton of a snakeroot plant, each branch covered in little brown stars. The white petals, once welcomed by the bees, dried to powder and now dust on the forest floor, but here were the star-shaped sepals that held those songs of botanical celebration…
Stop and listen to the ragged beech leaves, the pale specters of the winter forest. They are talking ghosts, screeching among the bare branches of some sturdy trees. The light of the Wan pours out their evanescence and burns to brilliance. Deep in the gray, sleeping forest, the beech trees turn into shimmering creatures made of shimmering gold.
Stop and think about the deep grooves of the persimmon bark, the way this tree has carved its skin into neat rectangles that are a strong shield. See how lacy lichens have found purchase in channels, sharing space in pits…
Stop and peer at a hummingbird nest, smaller than your thumb, in the crook of the farthest reach of an oak branch. Remember the flapping of hummingbird's wings. Remember the green light of the hummingbird light.
With the evocative feeling of Ursula K. Le Guin's poem “Kinship,” Renkl adds:
Stop and think for a moment about parenting. Think long and hard about parenting. The world is before you, a glorious garden. No matter how dirty you are, no matter how tainted by graft and tainted by deception, it will always take your breath away. We were never taken out of Eden. We just turned away from it and closed our eyes. To come back and be accepted, cleansed and redeemed, we are only obliged to look.
It may be that pausing to look at it is our moral obligation to the universe – the ultimate guarantee of life, repaying our debt of gratitude for the mathematically impossible miracle of birth at all, making the practice of awareness our powerful antidote to the fear of death.
For Renkl, this suddenly becomes more than a philosophical situation – in the last weeks of his year-long story, as autumn drags the living world into a state of frozen animation, a routine medical examination reveals the denial of death that we survive in our lives. When the biopsy comes back negative, Renkl notes simply that “that news is just a release.” You write:
Perhaps it was a sense of sudden, however temporary, death that made me look at the small, seasonal deaths around me with a sense of kinship. Fallen leaves soften my path, but not for me. The leaves fall to feed the trees, to shelter the creatures that are important to this forest in a way that I will never be. Misty rain removes dead wood, creating nesting sites for woodpeckers to dig up the following spring. I can stop to count the rings of shelf fungus on a dead tree and know how long they have been growing, how long the death of the tree has been feeding the life of the forest.
So much life comes from all this death that to spend time in the forest is to think of immortality. On my way out of the park I passed a red-tailed hawk lying on the ground of a power pole, apparently electrocuted, its entire wing extended in death. The vultures were starting to circle as I passed. I drove on, knowing what was coming next, what always follows: death to life, earth to air, wing to wing.
Death has always been the blood in the veins of life, it passes through it every time and every season, but winter makes it especially clear with the skeletal branches that embody the Braille promise of spring in the silent young buds that are already preparing for the next emerald formation. Renkl writes:
[Winter] it reminds us that the membrane between life and death is permeable, going back and forth endlessly and doing something to everything, no matter how small, no matter how fleeting. Being restless is only one part of life. There will always be a resurrection.
He is a completer The Comfort of CrowsAn overall refreshing read, with Paradise Notebooks – poet and geographer's love letter to the life of a 90-mile hike across the Sierra Nevada – and Katherine May on what winter trees teach us about renewing ourselves in difficult times, and revisits philosopher Iain McGlilchrist with attention as a tool of love.
