Month: June 2013

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Experiencing Awe and Wonder

annacitrino

A couple of evenings ago, my husband and are were sitting in the hot tub in a clearing under the redwoods outside our back door talking, when out of the edge of the trees came a deer. She stood there, ears perked, staring straight at us. Immediately, we went silent, our eyes fixed on the deer, her form subtly outlined somewhere between visible and invisible. We have seen this deer maybe four times in the past week or so. She comes up into the clearing, pauses, looks at us, waits for her fawn to follow, or sends it on ahead, then bounds along the edge of the trees a bit, perhaps pausing to nibble at a branch or two, before disappearing down the embankment and deeper into the trees. When the deer appeared again last night however, she didn’t move on. She continued to look at us for what was probably 15 minutes while we sat very still observing her observing us. Occasionally she moved, looking to the sides of the clearing, and later lowering her head slightly, as if in a bow. Not knowing what this meant, we lowered our heads slight too, bowing in return. Later that night,  I read that deer lower their heads down as if to eat if it senses danger, and then jerk it back up again abruptly when in danger, hoping the predator will give away its position. We weren’t predators, though, so had nothing to give away.

As we continued staring in silence at each other, I couldn’t help but think of Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels” where Dillard describes looking into the weasel’s eyes and she is “stunned into stillness,” and this is how we, too, felt. Dillard describes how her eyes were locked with the weasel’s. In our case, it was too dark to see the deer’s eyes, but this kind of precise vision of each other wasn’t necessary. Our presence mesmerized each other. I don’t know what the deer was thinking, if she was simply curious about us, afraid, or some other thing. What is the mind of a deer like, I can’t understand. She was free to move on, but didn’t. Dillard explains how her encounter with the weasel helped her realize how she would like to learn how to live totally present in the act of living as a weasel does.  “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you,” she explains. Such encounters in nature as these throw us out of our humdrum expectations about life or about what will happen next, and enable us to become suddenly aware of our connection to the universe of being. We are in awe, aware of our senses, fully present in the moment, conscious we are alive. This, for me, is one of the important reasons I am alive–to experience the wonder of being!

Moments of awe are rare, which makes me curious if awe requires certain conditions for it to appear. Is awe rare because we are so concerned with our schedules and chores that we don’t notice world around us as alive with the potential to fill us with wonder? Is it because we aren’t often out in wild places where we might be more likely to experience the presence of nature’s raw or intense moments? Art, music, and experiences in nature can all be possible ways awe emerges. Though most of us don’t often do we have the opportunity to witness the kind of art that stops us short because of its power to make us see ourselves or life so precisely, maybe we want to do more to cultivate an open awareness of life where awe can surface naturally. Could we, for example, practice noticing things on a particular walk we take every day from and to a particular location and begin to ask questions about what is there?

A couple of examples of things in nature that have the potential to evoke awe are found as video links in Vicki Zakraewski article, “How Awe Can Help Students Develop Purpose”. Interestingly, Dacher Keltner from the Greater Good, has found in his recent research that experiences of awe have the potential to feel less self-centered and act more empathetically. Empathy could go a long way in helping people gain the insight into each other’s worlds in ways that could help us live together more cooperatively and meaningfully.

Unrelated to power and control, wonder and awe require a stance toward the world that is open and receptive. The deer I observed in hushed scintillated silence in my backyard turned away with a snort when she heard a rustle in the bushes, but those moments in her presence made me aware of the wonder it is to simply be alive. The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Mankind will not perish for want of information; but for want of appreciation. The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”

gardening

Coming Down to Earth

annacitrino

This morning, my husband and I lifted 7,000 pounds of rock from their wire containers and hauled them over to the ditch in about an hour and a half, where they will soon be made into a retaining wall. Yesterday we lifted 3,500 pounds of rock for the same purpose. Needless to say, I’m tired today. Nevertheless, it feels very good to be working with my hands, my feet on the earth, and working hard. It’s a contrast to my life during the school year where I meet with students, spend time commenting on student work, and go to various meetings. I love the contrast, the balance of those two ways of being. It’s so satisfying to look out across the yard as I did this evening, and say, I made those stone steps leading down to the house! It gives me joy to be able to see the physical results of my labor, and it was labor, too, as the earth here is close to being sand stone and required my using a hatchet to chop into it so that I could carve a space for the stones to fit. When I am standing on the earth outside my door in the summer, or sitting on it, fingers in the soil planting, when I look up at the sky and smell the redwood tree incense, I feel so full and alive, complete. Connected. Real. As Wendell Berry said, “One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”

Mornings, I water the berries and herbs, the lemon tree and grapes. Since arriving in California this summer, the grape vine has grown about a foot, and the lemon put on numerous new leaves. My husband and I have worked to protect the berries by making a walk in wood-framed room hung with bird netting, which we are calling our berry palace. The juice of a boysenberry or a blueberry picked from our own vines and bushes exploding with tart sweetness in our mouths is a wonderful gift. Working on the land for our food, even the preparation of the land for food that we will later grow, helps me to see more clearly my place in the world, and how I am connected to all that is around me. I water the plants, and amazingly enough, they grow and become what they were meant to be. The diversity of life growing all around me seems a miracle.  Again, Wendell Berry says, “And the real name of our connection to this everywhere different and differently named earth is “work.” When you work with the earth, when you learn about it and from it, and take care of it, you love it. Work, it seems, can be a path toward love, can be the way to come to know the meaning of the earth’s gifts from the inside.

Slowly, as I spend more time working outside, I’m becoming more aware of the intricacy and mystery of life all continuing on silently around me. Professor Suzanne Simard in British Columbia studies forest ecosystem and explains how the “mother trees” exchange of nutrients underground through intricate webs of communication through nutrients. Her work is fascinating. By continuing to listen to the land, we can grow to live better with it. Working on the land, even in small ways, is one way to grow toward understanding what it needs.

As a teacher, my life allows me to contribute to other’s in a way that enriches, and that opens exploration and opportunities for students. A teacher’s life is a good life because of this. As I am outdoors working these past few weeks, I feel a growing awareness of building a new life here in America, a life I will come home to someday. I don’t know what that life will be yet, or when it will come to pass, but I hope it is a life that will go on giving back to the world, and that will allow me to grow more connected to the earth, to listen to its mysteries, and to be able to share my discoveries with others.

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The Subtle Beauty of Creating A Good Line

annacitrino

When I lived in the desert several years back, I recall seeing the beautiful lines nature drew on the desert floor’s red sand crystals using slender grass strands, as the breeze bent them back and forth in the wind. Beneath the grass in wonderful dark silhouetted lines rested shadows. The desert contains a wide variety of fantastic textures and lines. National Geographic has captured some of these here, and Danielle Venton in her Wired article, “Photographers Capture Mysterious, Beautiful Patterns in the Sand” says that people don’t even understand the physics involved that creates such beautiful lines in the sand. 

Using my husband’s recent gift of a new set of drawing pens and lessons from Arthur L. Guptill’s book, Rendering in Pen and Ink, I’m learning a new appreciation for the beauty of lines. What the sand, wind and sun do effortlessly, is a challenge to create with pen and ink. Drawing a simple curve and then duplicating it so the line goes exactly in the direction you want it to, for example, is not easy. You need to take your time and go slowly, deliberately forming lines like warm-up scales for use later in drawing. Even then, creating a beautiful line takes practice, lots of it.

Malcom Gladwell says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something. If this is an accurate analysis of what it takes to get really good at a skill, then I’ve got about 9,995 hours to go.  BBC’s David Bradley says in his article, “Why Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule is Wrong” that the research Gladwell based his research on actually suggests that the 10,00 hours are just a rule of thumb, though, not the “tipping point” at which you are a virtuoso. The amount of time depends on the particular skill you are practicing. “Learning and gaining experience are gradual processes; skills evolve slowly, with practice. And there is a vast range of time periods over which different individuals reach their own peak of proficiency – their concert level, you might say – in whatever field.” Ericson, the person’s study at Berlin’s Academy of Music on which Gladwell’s statement is based, suggests that what counts further is that “not just any old practice counts towards the 10,000-hour average. It has to be deliberate, dedicated time spent focusing on improvement.”

I don’t know how many hours French artist Simon Beck has put in to create his fantastic geometric figures in the snow, but the lines he draws using snow shoes are truly a thing of beauty and take hours at a time to create. The perseverance his work takes is inspiring.

Creating a good line is also important to poetry as well, and over the last few years, this is something that I’ve been trying to understand how to get better at. I examined lines from different poets, from William Stafford to Denise Levertov, John Ciardi, Louis Simpson, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lucile Clifton, Nick Samaras, Li Young Lee and a number of others, trying to define what gives a line its energy and strength. Sometimes I see it clearly, and sometimes it’s a mystery. It might take 10,000 hours to get it right. Seems like many things that hold great beauty take a lot of hours to learn. These kinds of skills are subtle. You can’t just create a rule to never break a line after using an article or after a conjunction, for example, because after making such a generalization, you’ll find a really good poem from an excellent writer that breaks the rule. That’s not to say that a good poet can’t or doesn’t sometimes make a weak line break choice, but I think that the writers I’ve mentioned are experienced, and their line break choices deliberate. People have different ideas of beauty, and different ideas about line breaks in poetry. The goal for me is to experiment and practice with increased deliberate focus while writing. What makes a line so powerful? What makes it feel right? Maybe it is an individual thing, but in any thing a person creates, practicing the skill over and over, and attuning oneself to observe closely what others are doing that stirs your own soul, and then to listening from the inside to what your own work suggests is a good start down a path that leads to better understanding. If I can learn to listen better to others’ work as well as to my own, if I can learn to listen more deeply to the world around me, I think I might gain greater insight into many things in life, not just how to draw or write a good line of poetry, but how to live. All these things are part of each other.