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It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our animal body knows where we came from and where we belong.  Gibbons from from Natural History and Illustrations of Mammals by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz, 1824. (Available as a print and a greeting card.) "Our origins are of the earth," Rachel Carson wrote. "And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity." A century before her, William Henry Hudson (August 4, 1841–August 18, 1922) — another of humanity's great writers devoted to rewilding the human spirit — captured the essence of what science now calls "soft fascination": the way our brains and bodies respond when we immerse ourselves in the natural world. In a passage from his altogether wonderful 1893 book Idle Days in Patagonia (public domain), Hudson writes:  What has truly entered our soul and become psychical is our environment — that wild nature in which and to which we were born at an inconceivably remote period, and which made us what we are. It is true that we are eminently adaptive, that we have created, and exist in some sort of harmony with new conditions, widely different from those to which we were originally adapted; but the old harmony was infinitely more perfect than the new, and if there be such a thing as historical memory in us, it is not strange that the sweetest moment in any life, pleasant or dreary, should be when Nature draws near to it, and, taking up her neglected instrument, plays a fragment of some ancient melody, long unheard on the earth… Nature has at times this peculiar effect on us, restoring instantaneously the old vanished harmony between organism and environment.
 Art by Margaret C. Cook for Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.) At the end of his life, looking back on how becoming "a better observer" made him "a happier creature," Hudson writes in his wonderful Book of a Naturalist (public domain): The power, beauty, and grace of the wild creature, its perfect harmony in nature, the exquisite correspondence between organism, form and faculties, and the environment, with the plasticity and intelligence for the readjustment of the vital machinery, daily, hourly, momentarily, to meet all changes in the conditions, all contingencies; and thus, amidst perpetual mutations and conflict with hostile and destructive forces, to perpetuate a form, a type, a species for thousands and millions of years! … [One feels] the wonderfulness and eternal mystery of life itself; this formative, informing energy — this flame that burns in and shines through the case, the habit, which in lighting another dies, and albeit dying yet endures for ever; and the sense, too, that this flame of life was one, and of my kinship with it in all its appearances, in all organic shapes, however different from the human… the roe-deer, the leopard and wild horse, the swallow cleaving the air, the butterfly toying with a flower, and the dragon-fly dreaming on the river; the monster whale, the silver flying-fish, and the nautilus with rose and purple tinted sails spread to the wind.
Tuning into this primal resonance between us and the rest of nature is the mightiest act of unselfing I know — a vital quieting of our ruminative self-reference that is the dynamo of most of our suffering. Perhaps to be a happier creature means simply to be more of a creature — a life-form among life-forms, alive only because countless other creatures died along the way to perfect this form in a world that didn't have to be beautiful, didn't even have to exist. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |  | |  |
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Steps are events, experiments, miniature rebellions against gravity and chance. With each step, we fall and then we catch ourselves, we choose to go one way and not another. The foot falls and worlds of possibility rise in its shadow. Every step remaps the psychogeography of the walker. Every step in space is also a step in time, slicing through the twilight between the half-fathomed past and the unfathomed future — a verse in the poetry of prospection. We walk the world to discover it and in the process discover ourselves. Craig Mod was nineteen when he moved from small-town America to Japan's majestic Kii Peninsula and began walking, only to find himself face to face with the questions he had tried to leave behind — what it means to forgive, what it takes to constellate a family beyond biology, how to live with the ghosts that haunt the history of the heart and the history of the world. These questions quiver alive in Things Become Other Things (public library) — part memoir of the search for belonging, part love letter to his childhood best friend, who "bled out on a dirt yard under the stars" when the boys were teenagers, part record of alchemizing loss into a largeness of being by learning "to walk, and walk well, and witness the people along the way."  Spring Moon at Ninomiya Beach, 1931 — one of Hasui Kawase's vintage Japanese woodblocks. (Available as a print.) Craig considers the primal nature of "this simple impulse to traverse dirt, to push on the edges of what's known to us," the strangeness of being impelled "to walk and walk alone and do so for days and weeks and months at a time": I've come to crave the solitude and asceticism of these solo walks. There is no quieter place on earth than the third hour of a good long day of walking. It's alone in this space, this walk-induced hypnosis, that the mind is finally able to receive the strange gifts and charities of the world.
In a sentiment evocative of Nabokov's insistence that "an active and creative reader is a rereader," he adds: I've come to realize the only true walk is the re-walk. You cannot know a place without returning. And even then, once isn't enough. That's why I'm back. Back on the Peninsula. Walking these roads I've walked before. It's only through time and distance and effort — concerted, present effort, controlled attention, a gentle and steady gaze upon it all — that you begin to understand old connections, old wounds. That the shape of once-dark paths becomes clear.
Over and over he confronts the old wound of his origins — carried by "someone nameless, faceless, someone pregnant at thirteen," raised by a mother whose husband left her shortly after the adoption to become a halfway father flitting in and out of Craig's childhood, too absent to be a parent, too present to be a stranger. Looking back on the longing to break free from his addiction to anger and blame, Craig writes: How could I be sure I was free? So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness — forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball — a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skull. I almost fell into a bush. I was hyperventilating — realizing my heart had expanded in some immeasurable, beyond-physics way that hearts can expand, and in that expansion I had new space. There's a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English: yoyū. A word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance. It can be applied to hearts, wallets, Sunday afternoons, and more… This extra space, this yoyū, this abundance… carried with it patience and — gasp — maybe even… love?
 Art from What Color Is the Wind? by Anne Herbauts Rising from the pages is a prayer for abundance against the backdrop of all that is taken away, an insistence on the possibility of finding beauty amid the ruins of our hopes. As he walks, Craig encounters "moss lush enough to lie down on naked and wilt in reverence"; he watches mountain crabs move like Claymation as they emerge from the wet forest at sunrise "as if birthed by the light of day"; he comes face to face with the unblinking kamoshika — the Japanese goat-like antelope, exuding "an aura of magic in how fast and sure-footed it is," this most alien and holiest of forest animals; he feels the primal consolation of his own animal nature, this biped whose peripatetic balance has been honed by myriad exquisite evolutionary adaptations, tiny structures shaped over eons to do one thing perfectly, elaborate chemistries mixed in the cauldron of time to translate the laws of physics into flesh: I think about how a walk begins, with balance, in the ear, vestibular, a few feet above the earth… Endolymph, a potassium-heavy fluid, oozes inside the so-called bony and membranous labyrinthine canals of the inner ear…. inside [which] gelatinous bulbs called cupula, attached to stereocilia, detect the sloshing of our endolymph. The body moves, the endolymph splashes, heeds the laws of gravity. The stereocilia bend and transmit details of the bend — how far, how quickly, which orientation — to the cerebellum, the brain-nugget secreted at the back of the noggin. The cerebellum decodes the signals, translates, makes a follow-up microsecond game plan.
The great reward is that each step can be such a cosmos of complexity and at the same time lead to such simple, elemental truths. Having distilled the core tenet of a good walk to "real-time observation of unfiltered life," having observed the core tenet of life in the Kii Peninsula — "a pervasive care throughout generations, a sense of knowing your happiness and health are intertwingled with those of your neighbor" — Craig captures an evanescent moment shimmering with the eternal: Silent morning, abundant sunlight, abundant life. Thinking about this care. Water in the fields rippling in the wind. Mountains of Kii all around, a silent sloshing in my head, keeping the sky up and the ground down.
 Autumn Moon over Tama River by Utagawa Hiroshige, 1838. (Available as a print and a postcard.) Traversing these enchanted landscapes via historic routes and backroads, passing through small towns vanishing before his eyes with depopulation, staying in thousand-year-old temples, he meets and walks with people who end up becoming family — father-figures, brother-figures, elderly innkeepers who put the hardest truths in simple words annealed in the hearth of living. One tells him of the young woman who wandered in years earlier looking for work and turned into a daughter. "Time passes, life moves, and that's what happens," the old man tells him. "Things become… other things." Looking back on half a lifetime of walking his own way to belonging, Craig reflects: Somehow as an adult I've managed to attract and surround myself with these people, these beacons of good… I love them so much that my bones ache — ache because I know I'll lose them someday. I will follow them anywhere. Together we walk in the near-frozen morning air and the sun rises. Light works its way across the rippling peaks of the Peninsula. Feeling returns to hands, to feet, to hearts. The mind moves once again. We carry our lives on our backs and traverse the spine of the world, no humans for miles, no routes down, just forward or back, the beast below always shifting, always ready to heave us off.
 Mount Fuji by Herbert Geddes, 1910. (Available as a print.) donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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"True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization," the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. "We need them." We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other's teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle gym for training the plasticity of being we call adaptation — may be the lever by which we lifted ourselves up from the flatland of survival to the mountain of civilization, the key that liberated us from the prison of our destiny as predators to become poets. And yet social learning is not unique to the human animal, not even to the so-called higher animals. ("Never say higher or lower," Darwin argued in the margin of a book he was reading. "Say more complicated.") It may even be most interesting — because it reveals reaches of reality alien to us — in minds that are most unlike ours. Few minds are more other than that of the caracara — the planet's southernmost bird of prey and one of the rarest, about as few of them alive as there are giant pandas.  1775 watercolor of a caracara by Georg Forster from James Cook's second voyage under 2025 images of the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Available as a print and a greeting card. Jonathan Meiburg investigates and celebrates these "disarmingly conscious" animals in his wonderful book A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey (public library), largely inspired by the legacy of William Henry Hudson and written with kindred literary splendor. He writes: Unless you live south of the Rio Grande, chances are you've never even heard of caracaras. But if you try to imagine ten separate attempts to build a crow on a falcon chassis, with results falling somewhere between elegant, menacing, and whimsical, you wouldn't be far off. A few species are drab and inconspicuous, but most are boldly patterned in black and white, with red or yellow skin on their faces and legs. Some are nearly as small as magpies; others are as large as ravens. All have broad wings, hooked beaks, and an alert, curious expression, and they live in every part of their supremely varied continent, from the arid peaks of the Andes to the steaming forests of the Amazon basin. Their most striking qualities, however, are their minds. Unlike most birds of prey, caracaras are social and curious, and they feed with gusto on foods other predators disdain… In the high Andes, a species whose feathers adorned the heads of Inca emperors has been seen working in teams to uncover lizards and insects by flipping heavy rocks, and the crested caracaras who unnerved Darwin in Patagonia are said to spread wildfires by dropping burning sticks in dry grass, and feasting on the ensuing stream of refugees. […] [Caracaras] have surprising and important stories to tell us: about the history of life, about the hidden worlds of their grand and mysterious continent, about how evolution can fashion a mind like ours from different materials. They might even offer us some advice about surviving in a world primed for an upheaval.
What the caracaras offer us above all is an invitation to rethink our understanding of intelligence, the self-referential ways in which we define it, the disembodied mathematical modalities against which we measure our definition. Among the three extant species of caracaras — striated, crested, and chimango — the chimangos (Milvago chimango) astonish with their feats of what we readily recognize as intelligence (like the use of memory in the service of planning and the use of tools in the service of executing plans) and what is more subtly so (like the capacity for deep play and the capacity for boredom). Reflecting on his encounter with two especially intelligent chimangos and their human companions, Meiburg draws on the science of how cells become selves to consider the surprising understanding between them despite the divergent development of our two kinds of brains: As you grew inside your mother's womb, drawing nutrients through your umbilical cord, your folded neocortex grew from the lower surface of your fetal forebrain. Tina's equivalent structure, a smooth bulb called a pallium, grew from the upper surface of hers, as she slowly absorbed the yolk of her hard-shelled egg. But though the structures of the neocortex and the pallium are distinct, their functions are alike: Geoff and Tina, like Hudson and Polly, could understand each other because their parallel journeys had led them to the same place.
The interesting question, the irresistible question, is why markers of intelligence like curiosity and innovation can clearly develop independently in different lineages, yet have not developed in every branch of the tree of life — why can't mayflies solve mazes and snails perpetrate revenge? Meiburg argues that social learning, and the plasticity of being it implies, may be the key: One factor that seems especially important in the evolution of what we call intelligence is a habitat in which the distribution, type, and availability of food is inherently unpredictable. Any animal that finds itself in this situation can't afford to rely on pure routine or rote behaviors; it needs to be observant and curious enough to find new sources of food, even if it's never seen them before. […] This is where social learning is especially helpful. If you can learn from the example of your peers, you can reap the benefits of their successes and failures in your own lifetime, without waiting for natural selection to do its slow work on your gene pool. But keeping track of so many details — the individual personalities and relationships of other members of your social group, the locations of many different food sources, and the places you might have hidden food to eat later — requires a larger, more flexible brain. It's also the kind of life that you'd expect to favor generalists over specialists. Indeed, nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent — baboons, crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans — are big-brained social generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.
This, indeed, may be what makes an intelligent creature in the deepest sense — a teachable generalist capable of teaching, a social animal endowed with the behavioral plasticity and "negative capability" necessary for embracing the inherent uncertainty of this brief embodiment.  Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. Couple with the story of how nature developed dream — another technology for practicing the possible — in the avian brain and the fascinating science of how owls see with sound, then consider how the new science of plant intelligence is challenging our notions of what makes a mind. donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For nineteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. | | one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. | | | |
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