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It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments — for Virginia Woolf, it happened in the garden; for Thich Nhat Hanh, at the library; for Fernando Pessoa, at the writing desk — when something jolts you awake and you glimpse that meaning out of the corner of your eye. You shudder with the thrill and terror of having touched the beating heart of reality, then fall back asleep into your daily life. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to keep awake the part of you that knows, and has always known, the truth about what it means to be alive. In Practical Mysticism (public library | public domain) — her century-old field guide to mystical experience without religion, the product of "ordinary contemplation" springing from the very essence of human nature, available to all — the English poet, novelist, mystic, and peace activist Evelyn Underhill (December 6, 1875–June 15, 1941) explores how we arrive at that revelation of reality, that elusive knowledge of the deepest truth at the heart of which is self-knowledge.  Evelyn Underhill It always begins with a moment, sudden and bracing, when "the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things" is revealed, leaving you "face to face with that dreadful revelation of disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle." Underhill writes:  Your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on… persists. Again and again you swing back to it. Something more than realisation is needed if you are to adjust yourself to your new vision of the world. This game which you have played so long has formed and conditioned you, developing certain qualities and perceptions, leaving the rest in abeyance: so that now, suddenly asked to play another, which demands fresh movements, alertness of a different sort, your mental muscles are intractable, your attention refuses to respond. Nothing less will serve you here than that drastic remodelling of character which the mystics call "Purgation," the second stage in the training of the human consciousness for participation in Reality.
The great tragedy of consciousness is the unreality of the self — those ripples on the surface of the soul, insentient to its oceanic fathomlessness. We encounter each other as surfaces, yet yearn to meet as souls. (There is a reason we search for soul-mates and not self-mates.) A generation before Virginia Woolf contemplated how to hear the soul through the chatter of the self and a decade before Hermann Hesse gave us his timeless prescription for discovering the soul beneath the self, Underhill chronicles what happens in those moments, always disorienting, of touching the naked flesh of life under the costume of self: It is not merely that your intellect has assimilated, united with a superficial and unreal view of the world. Far worse: your will, your desire, the sum total of your energy, has been turned the wrong way, harnessed to the wrong machine. You have become accustomed to the idea that you want, or ought to want, certain valueless things, certain specific positions… Habit has you in its chains. You are not free. The awakening, then, of your deeper self, which knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with the Real, awakens you at once to the fact of a disharmony between the simple but inexorable longings and instincts of the buried spirit, now beginning to assert themselves in your hours of meditation — pushing out, as it were, towards the light — and the various changeful, but insistent longings and instincts of the surface-self. Between these two no peace is possible: they conflict at every turn… The uneasy swaying of attention between two incompatible ideals, the alternating conviction that there is something wrong, perverse, poisonous, about life as you have always lived it, and something hopelessly ethereal about the life which your innermost inhabitant wants to live–these disagreeable sensations grow stronger and stronger. First one and then the other asserts itself. You fluctuate miserably between their attractions and their claims; and will have no peace until these claims have been met, and the apparent opposition between them resolved.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. Because it takes years for the tension to build up beyond the point of tolerance, the crescendo of this conflict often expresses as a mid-life crisis. Underhill describes the moment it all breaks down in order to break open: The surface-self, left for so long in undisputed possession of the conscious field, has grown strong, and cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious; gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up, from a selection amongst the more concrete elements offered it by the rich stream of life, a defensive shell of "fixed ideas." It is useless to speak kindly to the limpet. You must detach it by main force. That old comfortable clinging life, protected by its hard shell from the living waters of the sea, must now come to an end.
In a testament to the power of breakdowns as a clarifying force for authenticity, she adds: A conflict of some kind — a severance of old habits, old notions, old prejudices — is here inevitable for you; and a decision as to the form which the new adjustments must take… Its chief ingredients are courage, singleness of heart, and self-control… By diligent self-discipline, that mental attitude which the mystics sometimes call poverty and sometimes perfect freedom — for these are two aspects of one thing — will become possible to you. Ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go, you shall at last arrive at the point which they call the summit of the spirit; where the various forces of your character — brute energy, keen intellect, desirous heart — long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one, and become a strong and disciplined instrument wherewith your true self can force a path deeper and deeper into the heart of Reality.
Through this process of "simplifying of your tangled character," through "its gradual emancipation from the fetters of the unreal," you arrive at yourself — "the agent of all your contacts with Reality." To have found yourself, Underhill writes in the remainder of her wholly revelatory Practical Mysticism, is to have dived beneath "all that flowing appearance, that busy, unstable consciousness with its moods and obsessions, its feverish alternations of interest and apathy, its conflicts and irrational impulses, which even the psychologists mistake for You." Only then may you discover "your inmost sanctuary" and in it "a being not wholly practical… so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it" — a being you recognize as the truest you, so that you may (to borrow a line from one of the greatest poems ever written) "love again the stranger who was your self." donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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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This essay is adapted from Traversal. We look at a thing — a bird, a ball, a planet — and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in it—the portion of the spectrum it shirks, the wavelength of light it reflects back unabsorbed. Our world appears a swirling miracle of blue, but its blueness is only a perceptual phenomenon arising from how our particular atmosphere, with its particular chemistry and its insentient stubbornness toward a particular portion of the spectrum, absorbs and reflects light. In the living world beneath this atmosphere that scatters the shorter wavelengths as they pass, blue is the rarest color: There is no naturally occurring true blue pigment among living creatures. In consequence, only a slender portion of plants bloom in blue, and an even more negligible number of animals are bedecked with it, all having to perform various tricks with chemistry and the physics of light, some having evolved astonishing triumphs of structural geometry and optics to render themselves blue. Each feather of the blue jay is tessellated with tiny light-reflecting beads arranged to cancel out every wavelength of light except the blue.  Blue jay feather under my microscope. The Morpho peleides butterfly, singular and striking with its enormous cobalt blue wings, is covered with miniature scales ridged at the precise angle to bend light in such a way that only the blue portion of the spectrum is reflected to the eye of the beholder — a variation on diffraction grating, the technique astronomers use inside telescopes to fan light into a rainbow in order to study each color of light individually, decoding the chemical composition of the star observed by the absorption pattern at the various wavelengths, uniquely absorbed by different atoms. Of all the known animals, only a handful of butterfly species produce pigments as close to blue as nature can get — a green-tinted aquamarine the color of Uranus.  The Voyager's farewell shot of Uranus. (NASA.) In 1990, the Voyager spacecraft completed its epoch-making mission of surveying the outer Solar System with a triumphal final photograph of Neptune, rendered a stark cobalt blue by a methane atmosphere that so readily inhales the red and infrared wavelengths. Then, before its cameras blinked shut for eternity, before continuing on its vectorless voyage to travel farther from Earth than any human-made vessel, Voyager turned its enormous mechanical eye toward its origin planet — a pixel of barely distinguishable blue across the expanse of 30 astronomical units, an unfathomable four and a half billion kilometers away. With the camera's optics unequal to this sweep of spacetime, the photograph had no apparent scientific value. It was a poetic gesture, the permission for which the poetic astronomer Carl Sagan had spent years petitioning unpoetic NASA administrators. In the grainy image that came back, Earth appeared the way Whitman had seen it in his mind's eye, the poet's eye, a century ahead of the spacecraft engineer's — "a blue point, far, far in heaven floating." Sagan saw it as a precious "pale blue dot" beckoning us to cherish and preserve it, this "only home we've ever known." A home whose blue mystery we know no better than we know our own depths.  The Pale Blue Dot (NASA) An epoch earlier, the aspiring poet turned pioneering chemist Humphry Davy, whose 1799 experiments with nitrous oxide became the first systematic study of altered consciousness, traveled to Italy, where he collected samples of crystals for a series of chemical experiments that would unravel the chromatic secrets of the ancient world. First in Rome, among the remnants of the baths of Titus, and again on a small pot in the ruins of Pompeii, he discovered an arresting deep blue he identified as Egyptian blue — humanity's first synthetic pigment, manufactured by the ancients from the rare mineral lapis lazuli, which they mined in the Sar-e-Sang valley of present-day Afghanistan and turned into the stunning blue that occupied a special symbolic place in their art as the color of the sky and the life-river Nile, a chromatic echo of the universe itself. Their methodology for transforming crystal into pigment, matter into meaning, had been lost during the Dark Ages, leaving millennia of artists and natural philosophers to speculate on the secret of the richest blue. Upon his return from Italy, Davy published a paper humbly titled Some Experiments and Observations on the Colours Used in Painting by the Ancients. In it, he demonstrated that Egyptian blue — chemical formula CaCuSi4O10 — is "a frit made by means of soda, and coloured by oxide of copper." The color of creation, broken down to chemical code.  Georgia O'Keeffe. Light Coming on the Plains, I, II and III, 1917, synthetic watercolor on paper. (Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.) Two centuries later, the Madras-born, American-based chemist Mas Subramanian would accidentally discover, while conducting electrical experiments, the first new inorganic blue pigment since Davy's day, the first safe synthetic alternative to the crowning chromatic glory of ancient Egypt: the deep, intense YInMn Blue — so named for its constituents: yttrium, indium, manganese. Nontoxic, unlike cobalt and Prussian blue, it withstands fading even when confronted with oil or water, and reflects infrared light; to paint a roof in YInMn Blue would be to keep the habitat beneath it cooler, more energy-efficient, more impervious to the solar radiation that gives life and vanquishes life. All this splendor and unsuspected might derive from its singular crystal structure, encoded in which is the subtle, bewildering reminder that even in a portion of the universe as slender and human-trammeled as synthetic pigments, there are wonders yet to be discovered. 
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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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We live in a bipolar epoch — on one end, the blamethirsty finger of cancel culture and politicized othering; on the other, the zeal for designating people, real human beings with real human lives, as secular saints expected to give us unremitting consolation, inspiration, and encouragement. Both are cages that dehumanize the caged, negating the tessellated variousness of their personhood, the complexity of their human experience. All the while, our cultural mythos of success is skinning life of joy on the crucifix of achievement. Of all the ills that require our constant vigilance and courage, these three — ambition, blame, and worship — menace modern life more perniciously, because more subtly, than all the rest combined. I have heard no one address their interplay more candidly and more vulnerably than chef and author Samin Nosrat in her contribution to Yo-Yo & Friends: In Conversation on Living Creatively.  Samin Nosrat "Who serves best doesn't always understand," wrote the Nobel-winning Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. With her oceanic laugh and sunlit vivacity, Samin has been serving more than food for two decades — she has served, for millions, a model of being a conscientious objector to the warfare of cynicism destroying the modern spirit. She has also suffered the struggle, the strangeness, of being regarded as "a bringer of joy," being expected to play that role while wading through a thick inner darkness, the tension between wanting to be of service but also needing the freedom to meet sorrow on its own terms — not the performative suffering and competitive trauma rewarded in our time, but that most inward, private, and subterranean current of soul-ache that demands everything of us and shows nothing. In trying to find a way "to be truthful and authentic, and also share goodness," Samin found herself reckoning with how she came to be the way she is: I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there has been so much sorrow and grief and loss in my life, from the very beginning. I've had to actively orient myself, almost as a survival mechanism, toward goodness and toward joy, toward love and friendship and nature and beauty, just to make it. And that is what I want to put out into the world.
 Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days, also available as a stand-alone print and stationery cards. And yet she found herself in a void of joy, puzzled by how this was possible given how hard she had worked at her life: What happened was I spent my life in a singleminded pursuit of excellence, with the flawed (probably subconscious) belief that if I achieved the right combination of thing, that would make me feel okay, make me feel happy, make my parents finally proud of me. And then, somehow, I did achieve all the things I set out to do — and more — and it sucked the life out of me… There was an emptiness inside of me — I did all these things, I held up my end of the bargain, and it didn't work. So now what… I had to just sit there and be in that pain.
Burnout is often our best catalyst for transformation. But for Samin, that pain collided with another, vaster and more primal, until the two ricocheted into a revelation that turned her life around. Just as she was crouching there in the darkness of her burnout, her father suffered a traumatic brain injury. As he lay dying, they had the difficult conversations they had never faced. She reflects: More than anything, watching him die in that way really brought me face to face with my own mortality and gave me a sense of such clarity that time is so precious and that the way I had been looking at life… "If I I'm good now and work hard now, then one day I'll be okay, one day I'll be happy, one day I'll have joy, one day I'll cash this in." And I realized, oh no, no, no — there is no cashing it in: You have to spend it as you go.
Echoing Annie Dillard's searing observation that "how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," she adds: That really reoriented me to this sense that every day is my life… All of the small choices I make — that's what I'm doing. And I have to have joy… And, actually, all the sort of boring and menial parts of my life are where, if I just make some small shifts, I can have a good life.
Couple this fragment of Yo-Yo & Friends — which features five other conversations about the creative life (including one with me) — with the pioneering psychologist Carl R. Rogers on the three elements of the good life, then revisit Mario Benedetti's magnificent "Defense of Joy." donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For two decades, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human 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 it 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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