Good morning Hank, It’s Tuesday.
You know what? Let’s go outside. Sometimes it really does feel
like the world is gonna roll me. I feel like a very small boat on
very high seas, being tossed this way and that by forces so much larger
than myself that I can’t even comprehend them let alone control them.
Anyway, when that feeling crashes over me, I find it helpful to go outside.
It’s technically only the first day of autumn here, but the air is
already crisp and smells of fallen leaves. In past years it always felt
like autumn would arrive all at once. I’d be flying home from some trip
and look out the airplane window and see that the leaves had changed.
Or I’d leave my house one morning and notice I needed a jacket.
But now of course, time is unfolding differently. And so autumn has arrived slowly.
But also with so much more uncertainty and even menace. I find a lot of consolation
in being outside right now, but I’m not quite
sure why. Maybe it’s because nature is still
proceeding a pace, even as so much else isn’t. Like this morning I was thinking
of a Mary Oliver poem. I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall–
what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.
This is a stark contrast to the way nature’s indifference was
imagined earlier, in say Herman Melville’s Moby Dick where we read
of the demonic indifference with which the white whale tore his hunters.
And that the white whale shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities
of the universe. And so the idea that terrified Melville,
that the heartless universe doesn’t particularly care about us, comforts the
speaker in Mary Oliver’s poem. And I have to say, I’m team Oliver on this one.
I’m glad the world goes on orbiting the sun regardless of what I do.
I’m glad the Earth is not made for me, but instead that I am made for the Earth.
And also of it. I’ve read a lot of old novels where
the character’s moods change with the weather. You know, like how a
dark and stormy night outside also means a dark and stormy night inside the
heart of our protagonist or whatever. That always used to make me
roll my eyes. But now I see that it wasn’t just a metaphor. The closer
you are to the outside world, the more that world can shape your sense of wellbeing.
Same is true of the internet, come to think of it.
Of course this isn’t absolute. You bring yourself to the weather,
just like you bring yourself to everything else.
But we don’t exist independently
from the weather. Or from the world, or from history, or from anything.
And this is where the idea that nature is indifferent to us starts to break down for me.
Because the thing is, we are nature. And we need not be indifferent to
ourselves or one and other, or to life more generally. And it’s not quite accurate to
say that the ocean is wondrous or monstrous in its indifference to us.
Because the ocean isn’t indifferent to us! We move it around with our sea wall and
land reclamation projects. We change its overall size and
biodiversity by our choices. We move the oceans around,
and they move us around. We depend on the oceans,
and they depend on us. Humans are nothing if not wildly,
utterly dependent. And like the sea says in its lovely
voice, “we have work to do.” May the knowledge of our interdependence
hold fast even in physical isolation. And may the work to get ourselves
and each other through keep us warm in the cold months to come.
Hank, I’ll see you on Friday. This video contains a clue just like
all my recent videos do. But that’s the clue.