You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder two hundred times more slowly than the continental plates beneath are drifting apart, and the marbled orca carrying her dead calf the length of the continent, carrying the weight of consciousness, and consciousness, how it windows this tenement of breath and bone with wonder, how it hovers over everything, gigantic and unnecessary, like love.
It is all so improbable, this wild and wondrous world, against all we know about the universe. And yet here it is, and here we are, set on it to know that we are dying and live anyway, and love anyway.
Our most beautiful, most transformative, most vivifying experiences and encounters are like that — they enter our lives through the back door of expectation, shattering the laws of probability with the golden gavel of the possible.
In The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship (public library), poet and philosopher David Whyte captures the terror and transcendence we are hurled into as we encounter, without looking for it, “a degree of mutually encoded knowledge” with another person that touches the center of our being and discomposes the superstructure of life as we know it.
Whyte considers the insuperable force of truth pulsating beneath our resistance to such experiences:
Something inside the protective walls of… our established sense of our self may be preparing us, willingly or unwillingly, for an emancipation, a life beyond it which if intuited too early might be frightening to us, beyond our ability to reach.
Trying to navigate the situation, we tend to rely on the intellect to “to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and weigh things in the balance,” forgetting its immense blind spots and, still victims of Descartes all those epochs later, forgetting that the most alive parts of life are often profoundly unreasonable. Whyte writes:
Beneath [our intellectual assessments], untiring but seldom listened to, we have…. a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and what is bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being.
It is not easy, this reconstitution of the self, this uncharted exploration of the possible in the improbable. But if the universe can do it, so can the living fractals of it that we are.
Couple with David Whyte’s staggering poem about reaching beyond our self-limiting stories about love, then revisit paleontologist, philosopher of science, and poet Loren Eiseley on the first and final truth of life.
