Where it is "much more marvelous"

Oh, to sleep on a flower—an aster, goldenrod, late zinnia, or still-blossoming anise hyssop. Autumn is taking its time this year, but the weather has turned progressively cooler this week. Overnighting on flowers is precisely what the bumblebees have been doing. The extra weeks in the garden have brought me face to face with stationary bees in the mornings and in the early evenings. It is curious, and poetic, to see them nestled in. And then I found out why: naturalist, educator and writer Mary Holland posted a small story about fall bumblebees. Males rest on flowers overnight and then wait to warm up enough to mate with late season virgin queens. According to Holland’s post, their flight muscles must be above 86°F in order to get going—hard to imagine at our current 50s and 60s temps, but direct sun and shivering does the trick. I also find carpenter bees nestled among petals in the mornings and read that they can be either males or females.

 …with the approach of nightfall large carpenter bees often remain behind on blossoms to snooze. With no nest to provision or hungry future royals to feed, it is no surprise to find sleepy carpenters resting on flowers in the early light of dewy autumn mornings.

I love Holland’s blog, which offers two or three posts a week describing things happening with plants and animals in the Northeast. She gets at the small things that make up the fabric of plant and animal lives each day.

I love learning things about all kinds of bugs, bees and plants living just outside my windows, and delight in the science websites (like Bug of the Week where I read about carpenter bees) that are so tethered to the kinds of things I observe and wonder about.

But I’m leaning into my own observations, thoughts, and knowledge, too—keeping track of what knowingness comes from simple awareness. When I notice these bees resting on the flowers, I feel a sense of gratefulness that they are within my sight and perception. I feel protective toward them, not wanting to disturb them as they sit, cool and vulnerable, in such a delicate place. Mostly, I feel an affinity with them—I am aware that this is our autumn in the Northeast—this life that I am living right now, in this moment, is also the life that this bee is living right now, in this moment. Other things occur to me as well, like which flowers the bees choose.

I’ll never abandon looking things up and considering the information organized and presented by scientists and naturalists. But consider how innovative thinkers get to what they know, or how they tap into things heretofore unknown. One example is the unconventional method of scientist Barbara McClintock, who earned a Nobel Prize in Biology for her amazing findings in plant genetics.

In a book that I’ve read and re-read for years— The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Gender, Ecology and Society, Susan Griffin recounts how McClintock “developed a way of seeing, not only under a microscope but even with her own eyesight, which was close to meditation. This process involved hours of proximity, during which she discovered a receptive way of seeing” [my italics]. McClintock told her biographer Evelyn Fox Keller, that “by observing corn in this manner she began to understand genetics in a dramatically different way. She found that genes could jump from place to place on the chromosome and that things are ‘much more marvelous than the scientific method allows us to conceive.’”

It is this way of seeing and perceiving that Griffin highlights, and one that is systematically discouraged—beaten out of us, I would say—by most forms of education. It is, I believe, what good gardeners, farmers, conservationists, ecologists, wildlife photographers and nature illustrators develop. What all extraordinary thinkers and knowers develop. What good writers tap into. And that I believe we no longer teach, or cultivate, properly. It is part of what Griffin calls “a collaborative intelligence” and which she detects as a theme in Thoreau’s journal, when he wrote, in 1852, “I must walk with more free sense. It is as bad to study stars and clouds as flowers and stones. I must let my sense wander as my thoughts, my eyes see without looking.”

It reminds me of what I have grappled with in my career as a science writer, where I have been successful in “translating” basic research accomplishments into stories that appeal and find relevance among the “nonscientific public.” Griffin’s description of our quest for more and more data and machines that can process it all as “a strangely efficient sensibility, like a vehicle capable of tremendous speed, yet traveling in a void” brings up the quest among highly specialized biologists to create complete maps of molecular and genetic expression in order to fully “explain” life.

More and more, that explanatory quest seems like another way to avoid what Griffin calls “the very knowledge at the heart of being…that has banished experience to a world of meaninglessness.”  

Griffin ends her chapter, written so many years ago in another late October, with this:

One day, taking a pause from this writing, I step outside my back door. I am tired, my thoughts unfocused. I stand dazed for a few seconds. Then I look toward a corner of the garden where the afternoon light has an extraordinary clarity. It is late October, the northern California colors are browning, and everywhere, scattered among the evergreens, are russets, yellows, burnished by this light. The air is newly cold. All this cuts me with an intense force. For several moments I am transfixed. And I am not the same. I have been entered, ignited by this light, changed by this place.

I’m not arguing against science, reason, debate or facts. On the contrary, the systematic, rigorous and also creative, presentation of ideas grounded in facts is critical to our survival. Critical awareness invites meaning into our lives.

I’m advocating for more of an adding to—allowing for what can be known, how meaning can be absorbed, through our daily being-ness. Allowing for a proximity to knowledge that is different from looking things up.

I want to know things in all the ways available, including being ignited by, changed by, things happening around me. Because when I see the bees that sleep on the flowers, I know that in the right here, right now a much more marvelous world than all my formal education taught me can be known.