myopic mycelium

An unknown species flies across the moon during nocturnal migration.

“But if each bird in his nocturnal passage were as luminous as a meteor, how the heavens would blaze during the migrating season, and how wonderful would seem their journeyings to and fro.” -Orin Libby, 1899.

To contemplate the strangeness and wonder of these other ways of being is to begin to understand our place in the world very differently, to be reminded that we are not separate, or different, but part of a much larger system of impossible magnificence and complexity.

James Bradley, Deep Water

The world still hums with beauty and astonishment. We share the planet with whales that sing across oceans and navigate by watching the stars, with fish that pass ways of knowing across generations, with turtles that follow invisible patterns of magnetism back to the beaches where they were born.

A fallen leaf on dark green grass wet with dew.

Pine trees in shades of green were shimmering in the cool morning wind. Overhead the sky was gray but bright, and low clouds moved steadily across it, sailing on the sea of wind. Everything, it seemed, was moving.

Gareth Brown. The Book of Doors, 2024.

A yellow flower with green leaves and dark stem. The leaves are wet from dew, and the meadow is a blur in the background.

I had always thought of joy as a shouting, flamboyant thing, that tossed breath into the sky like a ball. Instead it robbed me of my speech and my air. I was pinned in place by joy and I didn't know what to do.
“Come here,” he said softly, and pulled me into his arms.

Bradley, The Ministry of Time

I turned back to him. As I adjusted to the dark, I could see he was staring upward.
“I can't manage it exactly without a sextant,” he said. “But I wanted to be able to orient myself.”
“So that, when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?”
“So that I will know where I was when I met you.”

When we reached the field, it was a line of darkness scrawled on the deeper darkness. We stumped our bikes over the wet, breathless earth.
“There,” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Stars.”
I blinked at him, and then I looked up. It was true. In the fresh March night, the sky was full of stars.

Cedar Waxwing with a piece of fruit.

Cedar Waxwing

Out of this mould, that might have come from the moon, or the interplanetary spaces, were growing mountain cranberries and blueberries, or huckleberries. We were soon so absorbed in gathering the latter that we were quite oblivious of the grandeurs about us.

John Burroughs. Signs and Seasons, 1886.

The enormous cleavage of the rocks, the appalling cracks and fissures, the rent bowlders, the smitten granite floors, gave one a new sense of the power of heat and frost. In one place we noticed several deep parallel grooves, made by the old glaciers.

The rock had that gray, elemental, eternal look which granite alone has. One seemed to be face to face with the gods of the fore-world. Like an atom, like a breath of to-day, we were suddenly confronted by abysmal geologic time,— the eternities past and the eternities to come.

A Cape May Warbler inspecting the underside of an oak leaf.

A Cape May Warbler inspects the underside of an oak leaf.

But if each bird in his nocturnal passage were as luminous as a meteor, how the heavens would blaze during the migrating season, and how wonderful would seem their journeyings to and fro.

Orin Libby. The Nocturnal Flight of Migrating Birds, 1899. The Auk, Volume 16, Issue 2.

The great space of air above swarmed with life. Singly or in groups, large and small, or more seldom in a great throng the hurrying myriads pressed southward. It was a marvel and a mystery enacted under the cover of night, and of which only fugitive tidings reached the listeners below.

The air seemed fairly alive with invisible birds as the calls rang out, now sharply and near at hand, and now faintly and far away. Almost human many of them seemed, and it was not difficult to imagine that they expressed a whole range of emotions from anxiety and fear up to good-fellowship and joy.

Is there anything more moving than awaking to wonders that you have been wandering among all your life unaware? Is there anything more hopeful than realizing that you've always been surrounded by sublime scenes?

Leigh Ann Henion. Night Magic, 2024.

Detail of autumn fallen leaves and small green plants on the forest floor. There is a tiny puddle of water on a leaf.

Forest floor (detail)

Autumn fallen leaves and small green plants on the forest floor.

Forest floor

Straining after these tiny sensations, I nearly rolled off the world when I heard, and at the same time felt through my hips' and legs' bones on the ground, the bang and shudder of distant freight trains coupling.

Annie Dillard. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974.

Or could I feel the starlight? Every minute on a square mile of this land—on the meadow and creek—one ten thousandth of an ounce of starlight spatters to earth. What percentage of an ounce did that make on my eyes and cheeks and arms, tapping and nudging as particles, pulsing and stroking as waves?

I was in no tent under leaves, sleepless and glad. There was no moon at all; along the world's coasts the sea tides would be springing strong. The air itself also has lunar tides: I lay still. Could I feel in the air an invisible sweep and surge, and an answering knock in my lungs?

I want to meet you in every place I ever loved.

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. This Is How You Lose the Time War, 2019.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.

Autumn beech leaves and blue sky.

George Henry Borrow, who suffered from depression, “pursued from a young age by what he referred to as ‘the Horrors’”, in Lavengro, 1851. Quoted by Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, 2012.

There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise a wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?

Eastern chipmunk in the leaves.

Vaanampaadi by Bharathidasan, quoted by Yuvan Aves in Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary, 2023.