"All of It" (Maria Popova)

Speaker 1 The early morning light is streaming into the room Alisa and I call our library. She's sitting across from me. Around us there are, of course, bookshelves loaded with the many and varied books we consider our friends and teachers. Artwork, including some of her photos also adorn the walls. Speaker 2 And Speaker 1 there's the two gray hills Navajo Rug, my parents bought at the Don Watson Trading Post in Cortez, Colorado, sometime in the early 1960s, when they were archaeologists at Mesa Verde National Park. That rug has a lot of meaning for me, a kind of meaning I feel more than I think. It connects me with the sensations that so early in my life were planted not merely in my memory but in my flesh and bone. The smell of sage and pinion pine, the grittiness of sandstone beneath my pudgy infant thumb, red dust inside my socks, the sound of coyotes, wild turkeys soaring hawks. These sensuous memories slant into my unconsciousness despite my efforts to pay close conscious attention to my writing. Elisa sitting in a cozy chair editing a bunch of recently shot photos of birds and other critters, flowers, trees and landscapes. As she works she oozes and ows so often it's hard for me to keep my concentration focused on putting what I'm feeling about today's poem into words. She's enthralled by what she sees and I, even though I'm trying to concentrate, find myself wanting to be enthralled by what she sees too. How can I possibly resist the allure of seeing what makes her tremble with awe while I'm merely fiddling with words? That enthrallment is one of the many things I love about her. Nature absolutely beguiles her. What she sees, what she feels in and through nature often holds her entranced, spellbound to things the rest of us overlook, like the photos she's working on now. She turns her tablet toward me and smiles like she's just discovered fire. And maybe she has. It's a black and white photo of a half dozen droplets of dew dangling from the gossamer of a spider's web, a bejeweled string of fluid beads shimmering in the long light of dawn. I'm feeling this enthrallment. The early childhood sensations awakened again by the antique Navajo rug hanging above her head and the awe of what Elisa helps me see and feel, all while I'm working on one of the most remarkable sentences I've ever come across in literature, the opening paragraph of Maria Popova's book Figuring. I've spoken of Maria Popova on this podcast before in an episode entitled, Let No One Judge the Love Between Two Persons. I said then and I'll say it again now, she's one of our greatest contemporary writers and she's one of my keenest and most valuable teachers. Her book Figuring is a long meandering amble through the lives of some of humanity's Speaker 1 most all of them rebels against convention whose curiosity, creativity and courage have given us some of the most remarkable discoveries and enrichments imaginable. Johannes Kepler, Rachel Carson, Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson and many others shine brightly in her mind and now because of her they shine in mine. Her enthrallment like Elisa's is alluring and I am a willing captive. Near the beginning of her book Popova writes some truths like beauty are best illuminated by the sideways gleam of figuring, of meaning making. That's what Elisa's ooze and oz do for me. Through the sideways gleam of her photographic lens and the slanting light of her ecstatic outbursts of wonderment I'm invited or better summoned to see the world differently than I might otherwise see it. Better than I often do my sight half opaque to its wonders because of the many distractions and blurments to make up a word that eclipses the beauty that's always near always begging for attention. I've heard that a single journey induced by a psychedelic like MDMA or psilocybin can change the brain and reveal the inner nature of things in such a way that we lose all fear of death. That we're liberated from the doldrums that often dominate our daily lives. That we can transcend the petty illusory differences and distances between us and every other thing. There are other ways to bypass the way the mind inhibits the soulful experience of enthrallment available to us all. Poems and poetic prose much like those memories evoked by our Navajo rug on the wall and the Ouse and Oz Elisa Utters and calls me to feel too. Poems and poetic prose can do this for us too. They can pry the mind open, expand the soul, arouse the senses in a way that dethrones the ego and drops us fully into the realm of the intuition that knows so much more than reason can ever know. Take this first sentence in Popova's book. It's not only the longest sentence I can recall reading, it's also among the most exquisite. And I sense Popova's aware of this too, for a few sentences after her long meandering lyrical trip into the inner reality of reality, capital R itself, she writes, How can we know this and still succumb to the illusion of separateness of otherness? Knowing what she reveals through her remarkable poetic prose, something she knows herself either through a psychedelic trip or her science inspired imagination or a mystical experience of another kind. Something I know too, in part, from the slant of light that Elisa and I share this morning through our shared ooze and haze and our enthrallment with the wonders of this world. Experience is born from psilocybin and sex, music and meditation can deliver us into this ever expanding sea of wonderment. And so can a sentence. So here is Maria Popova's sentence. All of it. The rings of Saturn and my father's wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein's brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar, and each idea Einstein ever had. The shepherdess singing in the real mountains of my native Bulgaria and each one of her sheep. Every hair on Chance's velveteen dog ears and Mary Ann Moore's red braid and the whiskers of Montaigne's cat. Every translucent fingernail on my friend Amanda's newborn son. Every stone with which Virginia will filled her coat pockets before wading into the river ooze to drown. Every copper atom composing the disk that carried Arias aboard the first human made object to enter interstellar space. And every oak splinter of the floorboards onto which Beethoven collapsed in the fit of fury that cost him his hearing. The wetness of every tear that has ever been wept over a grave and the sheen of the beak of every raven that has ever watched the weepers. Every cell in Galileo's fleshy finger and every molecule of gas and dust that made the moons of Jupiter to which it pointed. The dipper of freckles constellating the olive firmament of a certain forearm I love and every axonal flutter of the tenderness with which I love her. All the facts and figments by which we are perpetually figuring and reconfiguring reality it all banged into being 13 .8 billion years ago from a single source no louder than the opening note of Beethoven's fifth symphony. No larger than the dot levitating over the small eye. The eye lowered from the pedestal of ego.