More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp.
live by a creek, Tinker Creek, in a valley in Virginia’s Blue Ridge.
I propose to keep here what Thoreau called “a meteorological journal of the mind,”
The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.
I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.
a gibbous moon marked the eastern sky like a smudge of chalk.
How do you pack a hundred living ladybugs? The insects naturally crawl deep into the depths of the pine cones; the sturdy “branches” of the opened cones protect them through all the bumpings of transit.
have just learned to see praying mantis egg cases. Suddenly I see them everywhere; a tan oval of light catches my eye, or I notice a blob of thickness in a patch of slender weeds.
had forgotten the Law of the Wild, which is, “Carry Kleenex.” At
Outside shadows are blue, I read, because they are lighted by the blue sky and not the yellow sun.
Kepler wrote, “I was engaged in other experiments with mirrors, without thinking of the warmth; I involuntarily turned around to see whether somebody was breathing on my hand.” It was warmth from the moon.
Overhead, great strips and chunks of cloud dash to the northwest in a gold rush.
that doesn’t stop the sun’s wild wheel.
Take just the top inch of soil, the world squirming right under my palms. In the top inch of forest soil, biologists found “an average of 1,356 living creatures present in each square foot, including 865 mites, 265 spring tails, 22 millipedes, 19 adult beetles and various numbers of 12 other forms…. Had an estimate also been made of the microscopic population, it might have ranged up to two billion bacteria and many millions of fungi, protozoa and algae—in a mere teaspoonful of soil.”
“Everything that has already happened is particles, everything in the future is waves.”
There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable.
the butterflies were vaulting and furling about;
The Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway produce their own unique species, black and spotted in dark gold;
Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day.
But one big frog, bright green like a poster-paint frog, didn’t jump, so I waved my arm and stamped to scare it, and it jumped suddenly, and I jumped, and then everything in the pond jumped, and I laughed and laughed.
It zooms around excitedly, crashing into strands of spirogyra alga or zipping around the frayed edge
microscope at my forehead is a kind of phylactery, a constant reminder of the facts of creation
Ad majorem Dei gloriam?
“Never lose a holy curiosity,” Einstein said; and so I lift my microscope down from the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye.
We go down landscape after mobile, sculpture after collage, down to molecular structures like a mob dance in Breughel, down to atoms airy and balanced as a canvas by Klee, down to atomic particles, the heart of the matter, as spirited and wild as any El Greco saints. And it all works. “Nature,” said Thoreau in his journal, “is mythical and mystical always, and spends her whole genius on the least work.” The creator, I would add, churns out the intricate texture
The average temperature of our planet is 57° Fahrenheit. Of the 29% of all land that is above water, over a third is given to grazing.
The old Kabbalistic phrase is “the Mystery
Intricacy, then, is the subject, the intricacy of the created world.
There are, for instance, two hundred twenty-eight separate and distinct muscles in the head of an ordinary caterpillar.
six million leaves on a big elm.
I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that
am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.
Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today.
the creator loves pizzazz.
the frizz of an arctic lichen,
The experimenters studied a single grass plant, winter rye. They let it grow in a greenhouse for four months; then they gingerly spirited away the soil—under microscopes, I imagine—and counted and measured all the roots and root hairs. In four months the plant had set forth 378 miles of roots—that’s about three miles a day—in 14 million distinct roots. This is mighty impressive, but when they get down to the root hairs, I boggle completely. In those same four months the rye plant created 14 billion root hairs, and those little strands placed end-to-end just about wouldn’t quit. In a single
...more
an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the fields with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their soul come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.”
The Principle of Indeterminacy, which saw the light in the summer of 1927, says in effect that you cannot know both a particle’s velocity and position.
They seem to be as free as dragonflies.
These physicists are once again mystics, as Kepler was, standing on a rarefied mountain pass, gazing transfixed into an abyss of freedom.
The whole universe is a swarm of those wild, wary energies,
But isn’t waiting itself and longing a wonder, being played on by wind, sun, and shade?
The air itself also has lunar tides:
Every minute on a square mile of this land—on the steers and the orchard, on the quarry, the meadow, and creek—one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves? Straining after these tiny sensations, I nearly rolled off the world when I heard,
and the starlight rained.
ten percent of all the world’s species are parasitic insects.
wild birds are universally infested with lice,
But I am thinking now of the tree with the lights in it, the cedar in the yard by the creek I saw transfigured.
The tree with the lights in it does not go out; that light still shines on an old world, now feebly, now bright.
A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles.
