If you’re new to this autumn series of contemplative reading, welcome. You can find the previous issues in our archive, and read along with us in the weeks to come.

I’ve been enjoying the notes you’ve been making and sending to us — as last week, there’s a smattering of this “community marginalia” below. It is always so fascinating what each of us brings to a text or idea or work of art — how we see different things, pull at different threads — and so together approach a more vital, alive apprehension. Share if you’d like with @onbeing on socials — or in a direct reply to this email.

The metaphor of the “thicket” of life, the title of this chapter, only takes us so far. A thicket is something dense and impenetrable, and that is how physics has appeared at times for James Bridle — and much more, I am sure, for me. And yet conversations with physicists have been some of my deepest pleasures across the years, and a conversation with physics is inevitable in an exploration of what we are coming more deeply to see and to name and to work with about the whole of reality. 

I’ve been helped along the way to accept that I can take delight in science as a soaring aspect of the human enterprise, and so part of my inheritance, too, as a human. I might scarcely “understand” its equations and ways, but I can appreciate what it brings into the world just as I can appreciate, be immeasurably enriched by, a work of music — without being able to read the notes or perform it myself. Also, as my lens on the world is the lens of the human condition, I speak with scientists as human beings. It has occurred to me across the years that we get the science we’re ready for as a species, not just at the level of knowledge, but at the level of consciousness and agency.

So, alongside Ways of Being I am re-reading, dipping into, Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which feels as much to me like a meditative, poetic text as a book of science explication. All of reality is interaction, he drove home so wondrously when we spoke a few years ago, and that is not just an observation about electrons. Circles within circles: I’m reminded that the Latin word natura was a translation of the Greek word physis, which for the ancient Greek philosophers was not about a body of knowledge but an understanding and experience of the world as, by definition, always moving, emerging, growing.

As we enter Chapter 3, James Bridle tells of discovering the thinking of Karen Barad, a feminist theorist trained as a theoretical physicist, and a word she has coined: “intra-action.” Interaction, as she formulates it, suggests things exist fully formed and act upon each other. Intra-action honors the deeper truth showing itself continually, that the entire universe is “a continual process of emergence, in which nothing is certain or fixed, but is always becoming itself through its intra-action with everything else.”

Places along the way of (literally) unearthing the newly evocative “intra-active” story of us:

Danakil Depression

Bruniquel Cave

Göbekli Tepe

Denisova Cave

Neanderthal

Homo sapiens

DNA/RNA and proteins inside cells: “the internal fossil record” (microbiologist Carl Woese)

In the early days of On Being, a geneticist who was also an Anglican priest and theologian (the late, wonderful Lindon Eaves) told me that the spirituality of a scientist is akin to the spirituality of a mystic: always driven to investigate and claim what can be known of truth, while living expectantly, reverently, of what can not now be grasped, what can yet be discovered. 

I have loved this, and tried to internalize its appropriate and liberating humility. I hold it right alongside my understanding and attention to another bedrock physical reality, so alive at this time in the life of the world: that the human brain reaches for certainty and persistently creates category to make sense of the overwhelm of the fullness of reality. And science, a field peopled and driven forward by Homo sapiens after all, has also taken this route on the way to where we are now. 

This is a long passage from Bridle but I cannot do it better by paraphrase:

How unnerving, how thrilling, to live wrapped in, suffused with, such mystery. I’ll let Carlo Rovelli have the last word here:

“Every so often I would raise my eyes from the book and look at the glittering sea: it seemed to me that I was actually seeing the curvature of space and time imagined by Einstein. As if by magic: as if a friend were whispering into my ear an extraordinary hidden truth, suddenly raising the veil of reality to disclose a simpler, deeper order. Ever since we discovered that the Earth is round and turns like a mad spinning-top, we have understood that reality is not as it appears to us: every time we glimpse a new aspect of it, it is a deeply emotional experience. Another veil has fallen.”

Next week: fractals, “endosymbiosis,” and what all of this might have to do with the virtual mystery we have evocatively named The Cloud.

Save the Date! 

On December 6th, join Pádraig Ó Tuama and special guest Lorna Goodison – former Poet Laureate of Jamaica, winner of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry – for a virtual release party of the new Poetry Unbound book (US edition). It’ll be an hour of celebration, invitation, and of course, plenty of poetry. Details and registration forthcoming. In the meantime, you can pre-order your copy of Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World today.

Thanks to all who wrote in this week or tagged us on socials. Krista and our team have so enjoyed reading your reflections, and will surface a few each Saturday, right here. Notes lightly edited for length.

From Saki:
I am reading Ways of Being (digital form) along with you. My friend Diane has the physical book. We'll get together soon to pause and compare our notes together. I am parallel reading An Immense World by Ed Yong. I got Yong's book first. A few weeks later, I received an invitation from Krista to read Ways of Being along with her. I saw the term “umwelt” mentioned early in both of these books. Both authors invite the readers to imagine what it is like to be the unknowable. My umwelt has been exercising muscles that had been long dormant as I take in these two writings, activating my imagination for the symbiotic ways of living that I long for.

From Donal:
I'm loving these reflections and resonations within my own being. This comment, “more often, perhaps, by seeing and naming something we — the great we across time and space — knew forever and then ignored or forgot…” brought to mind these lines from T.S. Eliot's “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

After all our searching the universe for intelligence we might yet discover the wisdom lying all around us.

From Sylvia:
Listening to Suzanne Simard's interview [in the series playlist, “An Ecology of Intelligence”] made me cry with joy. I wasn't just being weird. As a teen reading, my back against a 200-yr-old cottonwood, I imagined a vast connected world below. Joy in the reality of a woman scientist uncovering the secrets of life below. In my 65 years of wandering Colorado's forests, I've had a brief glance at what she described. I began to notice that small sapling aspens were clustered around a single young spruce or pine. How strange I thought, shouldn't it be the other way around? The gold nugget word was “eldering.”

In these days around Thanksgiving, we have a tradition of thanking people who make On Being possible behind the scenes. There are many, and so we’re naming them here by their organizations and areas of collaboration — but our gratitude is to each individual we’ve worked with, and is heartfelt.

Thank you to:

Our funding partners and sponsors: Fetzer Institute, The Hearthland Foundation, Humanity United, Kalliopeia Foundation, Osprey Foundation, George Family Foundation, Angell Foundation, Lilly Endowment Inc., and the John Templeton Foundation; 

The many generous individual donors who also make our work possible;

Our transcribers, many commissioned artists and creators, live and digital event production partners, and contract studio engineers that have worked with us to design and present beautiful content and experiences across the year;

The team at WaitWhat and ICONS, partners on our Wisdom app;   

The teams who collaborate with us so we can communicate well with you, including DKC, The Fond Group, and Acora Partners; 

Special project partners we've had across the year, including CoGenerate, The Well, and VU.

Pentagram, Common Media, THAT (Technology, Humans, and Taste), and other creative and strategic people who are working with us to design and present new ways for you to experience the fuller On Being Project ahead;

The agents and publishing partners who created and launched Poetry Unbound — the book! — with Pádraig Ó Tuama;

The many people that support us as a growing, thriving, human-centered operation, including our colleagues at Team Dynamics, Reboot, Faegre Baker Daniels, Clifton Larson Allen, and the individuals who help us care for our Loring Park space in Minneapolis;

And lastly, a bow to our small but mighty board of directors we call our Wisdom Council: Jay Cowles, Konda Mason, and Srinija Srinivasan. Thank you.