Of Stars and Science

Kind of a pale gray morning out here on the screened deck (the screen is critical without it I’d be mosquito meat). An early morning thunderstorm has rolled through, and water still clings to the greenery -- the fortsythias droop with its weight and the walkways have the dull patina of damp. Birds are busy, especially the wren, the male who is singing either out of desperation because he has no mate, or out of delight because he does, the song the same either way. Sometimes a cardinal sounds, and I hear the liquid trill of a robin.


A slight breeze pushes through the trees, occasionally shaking loose a shower of captured raindrops. All is busy in Nature’s unhurried determined way.


The breeze intrigues me this morning. When one has the privilege of time to watch, one sees things that might otherwise slip by. Like the way in which the leaves of the lilies seem to move without source, then stop, a kind of faint motion, like something wraithlike is slipping through the garden. The modern man in me sees nothing but an errant breeze that has been triggered by some meteorlogical means, an explicable movement of air triggered by changes in temperature and barmoetric pressure.


I can imagine some less scientifically-indoctrinated person (perhaps stereotypically described as primitive man) seeing it differently. Why not see that motion as evidence of some spirit-being passing by, whether friendly or evil, who knows? Those of us in modern times are, I think, at risk, not of falling to superstition, but of losing the bigger picture because of our ideas and education. I’m not arguing for ghosts in the garden (though why not?) but for a deeper, more mysterious, world around us, one that scientific blinders may block, the way blinders are sometimes placed on racehorses so they can concentrate on what’s in front and not be spooked by things around them, things that might distract from the narrow purpose of winning the race.


As usual, someone greater than I said it long before I did. Walt Whitman, in his “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer Speak”:


When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

I need to sometimes remind myself to see the stars and feel the breeze for what they are, not for how I can explain them away.