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Hello Marco Silva! This is the weekly email digest of the daily online
journal Brain Pickings by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition
— gardening as resistance, an ornithologist on the spirituality of science
and nature as worship, a Nobel-winning poet's ode to our cosmic
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Waking Up: David Whyte on the Power of Poetry

and Silence as Portal to Presence

Poetry interrupts the momentum of story,

unweaves the narrative thread with which we
cocoon our inner worlds. A single poetic image
can lift us from the plane of our storied
worldview toward the gasp of a whole new vista,
where in the spacious silence of the unimagined
we imagine ourselves afresh.

For Adrienne Rich, poetry was a tool to “break open locked chambers of
possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire”; for Audre
Lorde, a lens for focusing “the quality of light by which we scrutinize our
lives”; for Shelley, a tonic that “purges from our inward sight the film of
familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being”; for Elizabeth
Alexander, a fulcrum for raising the fundamental human question that so
easily falls by distraction, indifference, and confusion: “And are we not of
interest to each other?”

Sometimes — not often — prose can do that, prose that carries the spirit of
poetry, the spirit that opens up rather than pins down the concepts
language conveys.

Among the rare travelers between these twin worlds is the Irish-English
poet and philosopher David Whyte.

David Whyte (Nicol Ragland Photography)

Drawing on his superb collection of short semantic-lyrical essays,

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying
Meaning of Everyday Words (public library), he has created a series
of poetry-driven guided broadenings of perspective for neuroscientist Sam
Harris’s mighty contemplative toolkit Waking Up.

In his short introductory conversation with Sam, David reflects:

The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is

silence. But… that silence is in order for you to perceive something
other than yourself — what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually
perceive this frontier between what you call your self and what you call other
than your self, whether that’s a person or a landscape.

Echoing Susan Sontag’s observation that silence is a form of spirituality

and a form of speech, he considers poetry as a channel for contemplative
silence:

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence

through attentive speech — speech that says something in such a
way that it appears as a third frontier between you and the world,
and invites you into a deeper and more generous sense of your own identity
and the identity of the world… Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can
actually create silence.
Illustration by Maurice Sendak from Open House for Butterflies by poet Ruth Krauss

His essay on silence in Consolations harmonizes this sentiment:

 Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of
fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to
shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known
and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously
unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives.

And yet, echoing poet-philosopher Wendell Berry’s lovely insistence that

in silence and solitude “one’s inner voices become audible [so that] one
responds more clearly to other lives,” he adds:

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a

kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly
emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. As
the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of
a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a
different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early
to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first
entered the quiet.

[…]

Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving
away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the
hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and
disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more
generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned
answer.
Moon at Magome by Hasui Kawase from his contemplative-poetic vintage woodblock prints.
(Available as a print.)

Consolations touched me deeply when I first read it several years ago

and remains my regular companion through life, as does Waking Up,
which has been nothing less than a lifeline this past life-syphoning year.

Complement this strand of contemplation with The Sound of Silence — a

lovely Japanese-inspired illustrated serenade to the art of listening to the
inner voice amid the noise of modern life — and Kahlil Gibran on silence,
solitude, and the courage to know yourself, and then revisit David Whyte’s
stunning lyric meditation on walking into the questions of our becoming.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND / READ ONLINE /

donating=loving
For 15 years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each
month to keep Brain Pickings going. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to
patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your life more livable
in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a donation. Your support makes all
the difference.

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Love and Symmetry: Poet A. Van Jordan
Imagines the Undelivered Feynman Lecture
About the Mystery Lying Between Scientific
Truth and Human Meaning

It is dazzling enough to live with the knowledge

that everything around us — the fiery cardinal
that evolved from the T-rex, the blooming
daffodil that traded its sallow brown-green for
blazing yellow to attract the primordial
pollinators, the human eye millennia in the
lensing, the eye that now beholds these wonders
and inhales them into a consciousness endowed
with the triumphal capacity for being wonder-
smitten — is a living record of manifest
possibility 13.8 billion years in the making.

Now consider living with the knowledge that all of it is not only the change
log of the past, but also the pre-composed code of the future.

I consider this one April afternoon, sitting in a Brooklyn garden just

coming alive with bud and bee, as I listen to a physicist-saxophonist friend
electric with enthusiasm about his research exploring the radical
mathematical implication that the universe might be autodidactic — that
the fundamental forces, rather than abiding by the static and predictable
laws we have so far discerned, might be the evolving self-perpetuating
algorithms of the ultimate learning machine, algorithms that began as
simple principles and went on to continually revise and elaborate on
themselves, not unlike biological evolution is continually revising and
elaborating on life. The fundamental poem, composing itself.

Brooklyn Cartesian Poem by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature
Conservancy.)
In detailing the physics behind this model, Stephon skips no beat honoring
one of his great heroes, on whose shoulders this theory stands: Richard
Feynman (May 11, 1918–February 15, 1988), whose Nobel-winning work
on quantum electrodynamics laid the foundation of quantum computing
and its promise of enlisting phenomena like entanglement and
superposition in computing the previously incomputable.

Feynman — physicist, philosopher, painter, bongo-drummer and safe-

cracker — belonged to that rare species of scientist who reverenced the
elemental poetics of reality in lyrical prose, who composed what may be
the world’s most poetic footnote and loved as deeply as he thought and saw
the poetic I of his human self as “a universe of atoms… an atom in the
universe.” His science and his spirit come alive afresh in a stunning prose
poem titled “Richard P. Feynman Lecture: Intro to Symmetry” from the
slender and splendid Quantum Lyrics (public library) by A. Van Jordan
— a rare poet who reverences the elemental science of reality.

Jordan writes:
 Love begins in the streets with vibration and ends behind closed
doors in jealousy. Creation and destruction. What do we pray for
but the equation that helps us make sense of what happens in our
daily lives? What do we believe in if not that which tells us we’re alive? Sex,
laughter, sweat, and equations elegant enough to figure on our fingers. Math is
spirit and spirit is faith in numbers; both take us to the edge but no further than
we can imagine. You don’t believe in math? Try to figure the velocity of Earth’s
orbit around the Sun to land a man on the Moon without it. You don’t believe in
God? Try to use math to calculate what the eye does every second of any
given moment. If Big Blue tried to work that differential equation in our lifetime,
it couldn’t. Mysteries inside mysteries in our own bodies of which we can’t
make sense, another world waiting for a religion or calculus to explain. Look
into any mirror; it’s like sitting in a theater watching a silent movie, but you’re
the one pantomiming your story. You think you have this world figured out, but
you can’t tell which hand you’re using and using and using. And why do we
try?

We try, of course, because curiosity is the true triumph of consciousness;

because what Einstein called “the passion for comprehension” is the
hallmark of our species. We comprehend by parsing the world into
categories and classes, constantly computing the distances and differences
between them. This, it bears repeating, is a beautiful impulse — to contain
the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a
foothold so we may climb toward higher truth — but it is also a limiting
one, a dangerous one, nowhere more so than in the artificial binaries we
create in trying to orient ourselves by differentiation.

With an eye to the limiting binaries of our Cartesian inheritance, and

perhaps with an eye to his own experience of love — which every artist
cannot but factor into their cosmogony — Jordan writes:
 You cannot solve for the use of one side of the body over the
other, so there is no single voice that emits from it. You cannot
solve for the harmonics of a dual body, facing each other, both
inquisitive. You cannot solve for the marriage of opposites, their fit, their match,
their endlessness. You cannot solve for the morning stretch that calls to both
sides, first this one, then that one, aligning the day. You cannot solve for the
bass of one hand and the treble of the other, both keeping rhythm hostage
under the skin of the bongo. You cannot solve for the balance of a locked door
and a safe cracker’s ear against it and the move X number of clicks to the left
and Y number of clicks back to the right and back past and back past till the
latch clicks open in your mind.

Complement this fragment of Jordan’s thoroughly wonderful Quantum

Lyrics — which imagines the inner lives and animating forces of Einstein,
Schrödinger, and other titanic scientific minds who have revolutionized
our understanding of external reality — with Feynman on why uncertainty
is essential for morality and his touching effort to reconcile what he knows
about science with what he knows of love after the death of his young wife,
then revisit Ursula K. Le Guin on the complementarity of poetry and
science.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND / READ ONLINE /

The Woman Who Saved the Hawks: Redeeming

an Overlooked Pioneer of Conservation

It is 1928 and you are walking in Central Park, saxophone and wren song
in the April air, when you spot her beneath the colossal leafing elm with
her binoculars. You mistake her for another pearled Upper East Side lady
who has taken to birding in the privileged
boredom of her middle age. And who could
blame you? In some obvious ways — polished
and traveled, born into a wealthy New York
family to a British father whose first cousin was
Charles Dickens — she bears the markings. In
some invisible ways — in the strata of
personhood that our unchosen surfaces and
accidents of birth are apt to conceal and
shortchange — she is anything but.

Within a quarter century — a span in which she would change the course
of culture and the vitality of nature for centuries to come — she would be
celebrated on the pages of the nation’s most esteemed cultural journal as
“the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of
conservation.” Those whom she held uncomfortably accountable would
deride her as “a very hot potato” and a “common scold” — but that
accountability would revolutionize policies and mindsets. She would
become things the words for which — words all of us now live with, for
things many of us are living — did not yet exist in the popular lexicon:
dissident, activist, citizen scientist.
Rosalie Edge by textile artist Leotie Richards from her American Folk Heroes quilt portrait series.

Rosalie Edge (November 3, 1877–November 30, 1962) was well into her
fifties when she became invested in the plight of birds after reading about
the slaughter of 70,000 bald eagles in Alaska. She would later write:

Thousands of people who had within them a yearning toward

nature, a deep-seated need to preserve its beauty, had been in
very truth asleep. I know, for I was one of them.
Until that point, her fierce wakefulness to justice had been channeled
toward the plight of half of her own species, which culminated with the
ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. But the
multigenerational triumph left Edge — who had spent years composing
pamphlets, delivering speeches, and serving as secretary-treasurer of the
New York State chapter of the Woman Suffrage Party — with the
postpartum hollowing of spirit that follows the completion of any project
into which one has poured all of oneself.

But a person of passion and brilliance is never bored for long.

One night while traveling in Europe with her family, Edge found herself
reading and rereading a sixteen-page pamphlet — the era’s primary
whistleblowing medium — titled “A Crisis in Conservation.” It exposed the
ties the nation’s network of Audubon Societies had to gun and ammunition
makers and the consequent withholding of protection from species hunters
considered pests or targets — including the bird, which this very nation
had taken for its symbol and spirit animal: the North American bald eagle.

Edge’s family summoned her for dinner, but she kept pacing the room in
fiery disbelief, later recalling:

For what to me were dinner and the boulevards of Paris when my

mind was filled with the tragedy of beautiful birds, disappearing
through the neglect and indifference of those who had at their
disposal wealth beyond avarice with which these creatures might be saved?

As soon as she returned to America, still thinking about the eagles, Edge
turned her wakeful intellect and indomitable passion for justice toward the
broader fate of feathered beings in the hands of the thumbed.
Eagle-owl from The Royal Natural History, 1893. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting
The Nature Conservancy.)

On the eve of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Rosalie Edge, in her dress and
her greying bun, walked across Central Park to the twenty-fifth annual
gathering of the National Association of Audubon Societies. There, she
calmly rose from the back to hold its leaders accountable for the practices
revealed by the pamphlet. After a stunned silence, various men in power
took took turns with defensive stabs at her credibility, then derided the
rhetorical style of the pamphlet without addressing its substance.
To Edge, this was only evidence that something was amiss, that she must
persist until it is righted.

And so she did. Over the years that followed, Rosalie Edge “stood up very
often,” as she later recalled. After seeing a photograph of hundreds of dead
hawks neatly lined up on the Appalachian forest floor, she traveled to
Eastern Pennsylvania to witness the barbaric tradition that had occasioned
the horror: recreational hunters gathering every autumn to shoot
thousands of migrating hawks, having stalked out the perfect summit from
which to intercept the migration path and perform the mass slaughter.

Haws killed near Kempton, Pennsylvania. (Photograph: Hawk Mountain Sanctuary)

Realizing that cruelty of such scale and such tradition required a solution
just as grand, Edge had no qualms about using her privilege as an
instrument of justice: She set out to buy the mountain.

In 1934, she borrowed $500 from Willard Gibbs Van Name (not that
Willard Gibbs; the American Museum of Natural History zoologist who
had first awakened her passion for conservation and with whom she had
founded the Emergency Conservation Committee two years earlier), signed
a two-year lease with the option of eventually buying the 1,400-acre
wilderness for $3,000, and hired two wardens — an ornithologically
ardent couple from New England — to keep hunters away. And so Hawk
Mountain Sanctuary was born. Rosalie Edge was fifty-seven.
Rosalie Edge shortly after the founding of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. (Photograph: Hawk Mountain
Sanctuary.)
Within a single migration cycle, hawk populations improved dramatically.
The sanctuary became a pioneering model of conservation, replicated by
other conservationists in other habitats to protect other species. Nearly a
century later, it is the world’s most active site of raptor conservation and
observation.

For the remaining two decades of her life, Rosalie Edge went on to become
one of the most vocal, visible, and effective champions of conservation,
inspiring the founding of The Nature Conservancy, The Environmental
Defense Fund, and The Wilderness Society; inspiring generations of
ordinary citizens with her ethos that the protection of nature is not
something to be awaited from above but a basic civic duty for each of us,
echoing her contemporary and kindred spirit Eleanor Roosevelt’s
insistence on the power of personal responsibility in social change.
Rosalie Edge in her late years. (Photograph: Hawk Mountain Sanctuary)

The New York Times never honored the city’s most ecologically impactful
daughter with an obituary, not even in their wonderfully redemptive and
honorable series of post-posthumous obituaries of brilliant overlooked
women. In Rosalie Edge’s lifetime, the paper’s sole headline containing her
name — printed the year Olympic National Park was created largely thanks
to the nationwide grassroots campaign Edge had spearheaded — hovers
over a two-sentence report of a shoulder fracture that Edge, “known for
establishing a mountain sanctuary for predatory birds,” had suffered upon
slipping at a dance party. But she is redeemed at long last as one of the
conservation heroes profiled and celebrated in Michelle Nijhuis’s
altogether magnificent book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an
Age of Extinction (public library), in which Edge figures as an exquisite
specimen of the species of visionaries Nijhuis interleaves into the broader
story of conservation:

Each person profiled here stood, or stands, at a turning point in the

story of modern species conservation — a story which, for better
and sometimes worse, still guides the international movement to
protect life on earth… Though they often used pragmatic arguments to convert
others to their cause, their personal motivations ran deeper, for many had
started keeping company with members of other species to escape their own
troubles. Some were painfully shy, or burdened with mental or physical illness.
Some were separated from spouses at a time when divorce was a scandal, or
drawn to their own gender when homosexuality was taboo. Most of them knew
something about suffering, and they found consolation in the sights and
sounds of other forms of life.
The Crowned Eagle by George Edwards, 1758. (Available as a print and as a face mask, benefitting
The Nature Conservancy.)

With an eye to Edge and her legacy in particular, Nijhuis writes:

 When Edge and Van Name founded the Emergency Conservation
Committee, the language of ecology was still unfamiliar, even
within the conservation movement. The concept of the food chain,
sometimes called the food web, had been proposed only three years earlier by
the British ecologist Charles Elton. The word “ecosystem,” commonly used in
ecology and conservation to describe an assemblage of interacting species
and their physical surroundings, would not be coined until 1935. Many
scientists — and most of the general public — continued to think of the living
world as an assembly of relatively independent parts, not an interconnected
whole.

Edge’s understanding of ecological relationship… set her apart from most

conservationists of her time. Her concern for all species and her opposition to
most hunting were shared by animal welfare activists, including many of the
women who opposed the plume trade. But while Edge hated cruelty to
individual animals, she devoted most of her energy to preventing the extinction
of species.
American sparrow-hawk by J.L. Ridgways, 1901. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature
Conservancy.)

She quotes Edge herself, who observed two generations after Ernst
Haeckel coined the term ecology:

The birds and animals must be protected not merely because this
species or another is interesting to some group of biologists, but
because each is a link in a living chain.
Rosalie Edge with her wardens and fellow conservationists at Hawk Mountain. (Photograph: Hawk
Mountain Sanctuary.)

I first came within the aura of Edge’s influence during my long immersion
in Rachel Carson world in the research for Figuring: Edge — who died
months after Silent Spring raised its epoch-making voice of ecological
conscience, and who never lived to see it inspire the creation of Earth Day
and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency — had been an
early voice of dissent and admonition against the heedless use of
pesticides. She had furnished Carson, who visited Hawk Mountain two
decades earlier, with key DDT data about the pesticide’s savaging impact
on birds.

While Rosalie Edge did not have Rachel Carson’s poetic gift, her fierce
devotion to hawks inspired it: Carson, who would soon popularize the
esoteric word ecology, composed one of her most breathtaking essays
about the interconnectedness of nature upon returning from Hawk
Mountain Sanctuary in 1945:

They came by like brown leaves drifting on the wind. Sometimes a

lone bird rode the air currents; sometimes several at a time,
sweeping upward until they were only specks against the clouds or
dropping down again toward the valley floor below us; sometimes a great burst
of them milling and tossing, like the flurry of leaves when a sudden gust of
wind shakes loose a new batch from the forest trees.

[…]

On the horizon to the north, formed by a series of seven peaks running almost
at right angles to the ridge on which we sit, an indistinct blur takes form against
the sky. Second by second the outlines sharpen. Soon the unmistakable
silhouette of a hawk is etched on the gray.

[…]

Here on the mountain top we are in the sweep of all the winds out of a great
emptiness of sky, and the cold seeps through to the very marrow of my bones.
But cold, windy weather is hawk weather, and so I am glad, although I shiver
and my nose reddens, and I look speculatively at my thermos of hot coffee…
Mists are drifting over the valley. A grayness overhangs all the sky and the
clouds seem heavy with unshed rain. It is an elemental landscape — a great
rockpile atop a mountain, nearby a few trees that have been stripped and
twisted by the mountain winds, a vast, pale, arching sky.

Perhaps it is not strange that I, who greatly love the sea, should find much in
the mountains to remind me of it. I cannot watch the headlong descent of the
hill streams without remembering that, though their journey be long, its end is
in the sea. And always in these Appalachian highlands there are reminders of
those ancient seas that more than once lay over all this land. Halfway up the
steep path to the lookout is a cliff formed of sandstone; long ago it was laid
down under shallow marine waters where strange and unfamiliar fishes swam;
then the seas receded, the mountains were uplifted, and now wind and rain
are crumbling the cliff away to the sandy particles that first composed it. And
these whitened limestone rocks on which I am sitting — these, too, were
formed under that Paleozoic ocean, of the myriad tiny skeletons of creatures
that drifted in its water. Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize
that I am at the bottom of another ocean — an ocean of air on which the
hawks are sailing.

Art by Jackie Morris from The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane

Complement with Helen Macdonald’s stunning H Is for Hawk, then revisit

Carson’s ecological clarion call to the next generations — that is, to us —
delivered months before Edge’s death.
 FORWARD TO A FRIEND / READ ONLINE /

donating=loving
For 15 years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each
month to keep Brain Pickings going. It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to
patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman
labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your life more livable
in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a donation. Your support makes all
the difference.

monthly donation one-time donation

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recurring monthly donation of your Supporter with a one-time donation in any
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