Birdsong

Often I think about that Mary Oliver poem which reads

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Wild Geese, Mary Oliver

I am looking for ways and wild geese. What calls to me is however I can predict something about how the trees dance. How that which is outside of me is in part within me. Those structures I never seem to fully grasp yet have access to, calling to me like Emily Dickinson’s songbird:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Hope is the things with feathers, Emily Dickinson

Quantum mechanics predicts experimental results with a precision up to ten decimal places. General relativity may be precise up to twenty-one decimal places. I have no clue why or how the rhyme or reason of men who liked to come up with vector spaces or topologies has to do with what surrounds me. I have no clue why or how a Hilbert space permits that access, nor a Riemannian manifold nor a Euclidean plane.

I’ve no clue. I marvel at their explanatory power, asking how on Earth were we this lucky to find anything out about anything at all, to describe whatever a menial set of primitive senses allows us to detect about the world? And there is no guarantee we will learn any more, no certainty that, as we chip at the mountain of physical reality, we will not run into a hard rock that fatedly resists us. Still that diamond of truth is there, hidden and unaltered by the inquisition of man. There it is, perching in the soul, never asking a crumb of our animal bodies. We were never guaranteed such gentleness in this vacuous, cold place of the material universe. Yet the gale and geese offer themselves to us, over and over announcing your and my place in the family of things.