One September dawn on the verge of a significant life change, sitting on my poet friend's dock, I watched a great blue heron rise slow and prehistoric through the morning mist, carrying the sky on her back. In the years since, the heron has become the closest thing I have to what native traditions call a spirit animal. It has appeared at auspicious moments in my life, when I have most yearned for assurance. It became the first bird I worked with in my almanac of divinations. At times of harrowing uncertainty and longing for resolution, I have found in the long stillness of the hunting bird, waiting for the right moment to do the next right thing, a living divination — a great blue reminder that patience respects the possible.
It is naïve, of course, to believe that this immense and impartial universe is sending us, transient specks of stardust, personalized signs about how to live the cosmic accident of our lives. Still, it is as foolish to ask the meaning of a bird as it is to see it as a random assemblage of feather and bone. Reality lives somewhere between matter and meaning. One makes us, the other we make to bear our mortality and the confusions of being alive. Meaning arises from what we believe to be true, reality is the truth that endures whether or not we believe in it. That is the difference between signs and omens. Signs disrespect the nature of reality, while omens betoken our search for meaning, reverent of the majesty and mystery of the universe — they are a conversation between consciousness and reality in the poetic language of belief.
A bird is never a sign, but it can become an omen if our attention and intention entwine about it in that golden thread of personal significance and purpose that gives life meaning.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
Jarod Anderson also turns to the great blue heron as a lens on our search for meaning in Something in the Woods Loves You (public library) — his poignant meditation on surviving the darkest recesses of human nature, the strange fusion of shame and sadness that gives depression its devastating power, by turning to the luminous and numinous in nature. Emerging from the pages is a lyrical love letter to how "imaginative empathy" heals and harmonizes our relationship to ourselves, to each other, to the wonder of being alive.
Reflecting on the difficulty of interpreting his own life and on the myriad symbologies of the great blue heron — among them an ancient myth in which the bird dusts the surface of the water with golden starlight to attract bluegill — Anderson writes:
The heron is exactly what the heron is to you in the moment you choose to give it meaning. It will be that meaning until you decide it means something else. That's how meaning works. It's a subjective act of interpretation.
You might get the impression that I'm saying herons are meaningless, but that's not what I'm saying at all. When I see a heron and interpret its behavior as a reminder for me to slow down and think about what actually matters in my life, that is what that heron means. Meaning, like many crafts, happens in collaboration between maker and materials.
[…]
The heron allows me to build the meaning I need for the moment I need it. Making meaning in this way is like creating harmony with two voices… The trouble starts when we forget about our participation in the creation of harmony, of meaning. When we remove our agency in meaning-making, we start to think in absolutes.
Whenever we think in absolutes, we ossify. Our freedom always lies in our flexibility, and because concepts like meaning and identity are not fixed, because, as Anderson observes, they "require our intentional participation," they are "mercifully flexible." They take the shape of our beliefs about who we are and what we deserve, they abide by the messages we send ourselves through the omens we make of reality.
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
Watching the herons walking his local shoreline, feeling like they are sending him "an overt message" about the power of "quiet contemplation and self-determination," Anderson writes:
The heron only represents self-determination when I need her to. That doesn't diminish the heron's power. It simply highlights my own.
There are objective facts in the world. Of course there are. But our concept of self, our significance, our sense of whether or not we deserve to take up space in the universe or experience joy and contentment — these are not questions of fact, they are questions of meaning.
For those of us who find consolation in the natural world, the sense of meaning has to do with contacting the numinous quality of sea and sky and songbird, of everything that makes this planet a world. You may call that contact wonder. You may call it magic. "If you don't think herons are magic," Anderson writes, "you need to broaden your definition of that word."
My local heron, the mystic. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)
Looking back on the bleak period when depression swept away the herons from the sky of his mind and voided the world of wonder, he reflects:
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Paying attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shallows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what is real. It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
In the remainder of Something in the Woods Loves You, Anderson goes on to lens the search for meaning through a kaleidoscope of living wonders, from the sugar maple to the red-tailed hawk to the morel mushroom. Couple it with Loren Eiseley on warblers as a lens on the wonder of being, then revisit some of humanity's greatest writers on nature as an antidote to depression and Terry Tempest Williams on the bird in the heart.
It is the silence between the notes that distinguishes music from noise, the stillness of the soil that germinates the seeds to burst into bloom. It is in the gap of absence that we learn trust, in the gap between knowledge and mystery that we discover wonder. Every act of making space is in some sense a creative act and an act of faith. And yet in its open-endedness and indeterminacy, in its courtship of uncertainty, it challenges our most basic instincts about how to govern our lives, unsettling the foundation of our illusion of control (which is always the opposite of faith).
Italian writer Paola Quintavalle and artist Miguel Tanco offer a lovely antidote to our unease about this essential creative and contemplative act in Making Space (public library) — a charming illustrated taxonomy of the many forms of this existential exhale, the many ways we can deepen and magnify life by giving things beyond our control the time and space they take.
There is making space "to plant a seed and watch it grow," space "for taking a chance" and "for another try," space "for a hand to hold and when it's time, for letting go."
Children hold vigil over a dead bird, making space "for those who are no longer here." A boy with a party hat and a mouthful of cake encircled by angry peers in party hats becomes an emblem of "the truth stuck inside your mouth." A constellation of little cosmonauts make space "to wonder why."
Page by page, there emerges a growing awareness that making space is really about our relationship to time and the unknown — that it is intimately related to learning how to wait better, that it is a laboratory for the paradoxes and possibilities of change, that it is where we come to terms with our necessary losses. ("Longing is like the Seed," Emily Dickinson wrote, beholden to "the Hour, and the Zone, / Each Circumstance unknown.")
Couple Making Space with Pablo Neruda's beautiful poem "Keeping Quiet," then revisit 200 years of beloved writers, artists, and scientists on the rewards of solitude, that supreme act of making space.
Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books
On the morning of April 10, 1535, the skies of Stockholm came ablaze with three suns intersected by several bright circles and arcs. Awestruck, people took it for a sign from God — a benediction on the new Lutheran faith that had taken hold of Sweden. Catholics took it for the opposite — punishment lashed on King Gustav Vasa for having ushered in the Protestant Reformation a decade earlier.
What the pious were actually witnessing was a parhelion, from the Greek for "beside the sun," also known as sundog or mock sun — an atmospheric optical phenomenon caused by the refraction of sunlight through ice crystals in high, cold cirrus or cirrostratus clouds, or in moist ground-level clouds known as diamond dust.
Vädersolstavlan, 1535 / 1636
Parhelia have staggered the human imagination since the dawn of our common record, epochs before empiricism could cast its ray of illumination upon their mystery. "Two mock suns rose with the sun and followed it all through the day until sunset," Aristotle wrote in the oldest known account of the phenomenon. "Those that affirm they witnessed this prodigy are neither few nor unworthy of credit, so that there is more reason for investigation than incredulity," Cicero wrote in urging the Roman Senate to examine "the nature of the parhelion." A generation after him, Seneca included sundogs in his epochal Naturales Quaestiones. They appear in the Old Farmer's Almanac as omens of storms.
That awe-smiting April in Stockholm, the Chancellor and Lutheran scholar Olaus Petri commissioned a painting of the wondrous event — a painting that became the epicenter of a political controversy when the King took it as an insult and narrowly spared Petri capital punishment. Known as Vädersolstavlan — Swedish for "The Sundog Painting" — it is considered the oldest known depiction of sundogs.
More than three centuries later, a little girl beheld the enormous painting in a Swedish cathedral, absorbing its magic and its mystery into the cabinet of curiosities that is a child's imagination. Half a lifetime and a revelation later, Hilma af Klint (October 26, 1862–October 21, 1944) would draw on it in many of her own immense and unexampled paintings reckoning with the hidden strata of reality.
Art by Hilma af Klint from her series Childhood Paintings, 1907.
Because of the conditions they requires, perihelia are among the least common and most dramatic of atmospheric optical phenomena. They appear when flat hexagonal ice crystals drift into a horizontal orientation relative to the surface of the Earth and catch sunlight, acting as prisms to refract rays sideways with a minimum deflection of 22°. This is why sundogs appear in pairs at around 22° on either side of the sun, and why they are often accompanied — as they were that spring morning in 1535 — by a 22° halo forming a ring at the same angular distance from the sun as the sundogs, thus appearing to intersect and connect all three stars into a luminous orrery of circles. It is difficult to behold its exquisite geometry and not feel it to be sacred. It is difficult not to see these geometric elements as an organizing principle of Hilma af Klint's mystical paintings. Art, after all, might just be our sensemaking mechanism for wonder. In this respect, it is not the opposite of science but its twin.
A CONVERSATION SERIES
To celebrate the centennial of The Morgan Library & Museum — one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture — I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger conversations about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative women I know: poet Marie Howe, artist and podcaster Debbie Millman, children's book author and artist Sophie Blackall, and composer Paola Prestini. We will be investigating questions like the nature of time and self, the art of observation and the art of vision, the relationship between memory and self-forgetfulness in creative work, and the power of being an outsider, lensed through Whitman and Dickinson, The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland, the invisible women in the margins of classical music and the hidden philosophy in the margins of children's books. Tickets here.
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