Diane Ackerman (DA) celebrates dawn

Week 4 increased my appreciation of jazz-like word riffs

“I bow to rust,” says Diane Ackerman, a celebrated storyteller-poet-naturalist who explores a year of dawns through personal meditations.

One thing my deep reading experiment is bringing me is an appreciation of jazz-like riffs. As a regular plot-skimmer, I have often zoomed past those long, twisting, sensory explorations of a theme. My loss. Diane says, “We underestimate rust,” and continues to paint a portrait that makes rust seem like a kindly ancestor complete with muttonchops, as she explains that rust …

“may well have sponsored all of life on Earth.”

“All you really need,” she writes, “is rocks and water, and everything else happens by itself. When iron sulfide (rust) from Earth’s hot core meets cold water, the shock creates honeycombed chimneys where the first living cells could have grown. Subject oxygen and carbon dioxide—so plentiful on the young Earth —to heat and high pressure, with rust as a catalyst, and a metabolism naturally ensues. The earliest microbes would have left those cradles to colonize the land. We still carry some of that primordial iron in our cells today. Rust is a very slow fire, and like fire it releases energy as it devours.”

While rust has always been a favored photography subject, I’m not sure I’ll ever look at it in the same way.

Rust

Diane also riffs on wabi-sabi, the Japanese cultural tendency to value aged and imperfect items. While this term has been around awhile, her riffing exploration is lovely:

“an intimacy with nature and delight in the rustic details of daily life. The hermit’s eye turned toward the minute, the crude, the cracked, the incomplete, those objects with interesting crevices—especially if something was rusted, weathered, or worn, revealing the passage of time. … (It) favored the purity of humble forms, but unlike European modernism’s idea of smooth, streamlined, futuristic creations, wabi-sabi valued the organic, imperfect, faded nature of earthy things that were handmade one at a time, not mass-produced, and all the more appealing when worn through loving use.”

This reading reminded me of a riff from a different author that I have carried around with me since 1974 when Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published:

"One day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreaming. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance...I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck."

-- Annie Dillard, A Pilgrim at Tinker's Creek

While I didn’t fully grasp what she meant, something in me leaned into those words … yearning. Since then, I’ve always wanted to see those lights and to be struck like a bell. I have looked long and tried to stay always ready, however, I’ve never seen them. I haven’t given up though … they still haunt me.

Annie’s book The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New is on the short list for the next deep reading adventure. And, I’m always interested in books you might recommend for deep reading.

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***So far, I love this experiment in deep reading. It feels more like a process of creating friendships with the authors … or like being mentored by five wisdom sharers. The choices are reasonably good fits for me with each one offer puzzle pieces for an unknown larger composition.

Although I almost gave up on the book I have the least connection with, I’m going to continue and see what it might bring me for my persistence.

January: An Abundance of Attention month

Every day during this transition month, I will share a small bit of inspiration focused on ATTENTION. Rather than overload your email, they will be posted to Substack Notes … and gathered into a digital word-and-image book for paid subscribers.

Twice weekly posts are always free and will never be paywalled. The only tangible benefit of becoming a paid subscriber is immediate access to the digital books I make along the way. Last year there were 15 of these digital explorations; who knows how many will come your way this year.

The muse and I have an agreement … I follow her lead and she continues to bring new things that fascinate me enough to make these small word-and-image books.

And, one of the main points of all of this is to stimulate conversation, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on attention … or anything else that is going on in your world.