to Illinois, to the farm my mother’s father had given her as a present. He never expected her to live there.
When they arrived, they parked the trailer in the back pasture, under the black walnut tree, and set to work. Farming was familiar. Things were done just about the same as when my father’s father had tilled the soil in Denmark. When we left nine years later, everything had changed. We had entered the era of more: more land, more money, more equipment. And of less: less community, less intimacy, less humor. But a photo of this first season shows my parents standing side by side in a field of corn, children by their sides, watching the sun set on the horizon. This was their place, their work, their time to learn and grow together with the land.
Standing, read aloud or write and read your own story about the upright stance.
Underlying Patterns: Earth
We have forgotten what we can count on.
—Terry Tempest Williams, Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, 1997
It takes both a macroscopic and microscopic perspective to understand place. Macroscopically, we can reflect on basic occurrences over the past 4.5 billion years that have affected the Earth’s land forms, temperature, and capacity for sustaining life, as well as ongoing influences such as the eruptions of volcanoes, recomposition of the atmosphere, and the movement of tectonic plates. We can consider patterns of rhythmic variation—rhythmicity—that affect relationship to place moment by moment, such as the Earth’s rotation, which contributes to the cycles of day and night, weather, and the tides. Fluctuations in electromagnetic fields, gravitational pull, light and sound waves, and air pressure trigger such diverse responses as the migration of the monarch butterfly and the opening and closing of the night-blooming datura, as well as influencing our human moods, biological rhythms, actions, and interactions.
Sangam Ritual Series, sculpture by Michael Singer. Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado. Photograph by David Stansbury.
RHYTHM
The concept of microscopic and macroscopic perspective can seem distant. But a film called Powers of Ten, made by the husband and wife team, Charles and Ray Eames, in 1977, offers direct experience. It begins with two figures lying on a picnic blanket on the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago; then in ten frames to the second, we move by steps out into the universe until we are out of the galaxy. Then we reverse the process, returning in dizzying speed to the couple on the lawn. But then we go further: through the skin and inside the body into the cells, electrons, and empty space—as far in as we were out, to the power of 10. It stretches our imagination to watch this ten-minute film. I have seen it many times, and each viewing leaves me breathless, as it exposes the macrocosmic and microcosmic patterns that underlie our lives.
When we went through the Grand Canyon by raft, we passed from recent time to distant past and back in seven days—a journey of three billion years at least. The river was the connecting link, moving us through time. When we stopped at Redwall Cavern, a natural overhang (some 500 feet wide and 150 feet deep), our guide pointed out a crinoid “sea lily” stem fossilized in limestone, resting on the fine sand beach (400 mya). Tracing its curves, I reflected on spiral patterns present today in the chambered nautilus, with its mathematically exact proportions, and also in the Milky Way galaxy, in a single strand of muscle fiber, and in our DNA. I felt the delicate beauty of an early attempt at efficient form, a rhythmic pattern amplified through time.
Understanding place also requires a microscopic view to discern the primary building blocks that comprise our universe. Scientists have postulated that the universe is made of molecules (groups of atoms), atoms (made of particles), and subatomic particles held together by such basic forces as gravity and magnetism. Since the general acceptance of quantum mechanics in the 1940s, the distinction between matter and motion has been blurred. Pārticles, or waves, sometimes described as energy fields, constitute all aspects of our universe as far as we know, disrupting any notion of fixed and solid matter. Stars, trees, dogs, the paper of this page, and our bodies are composed of the same fundamental particles. In this view we can recognize the interconnectedness of cosmological community: humans are inextricably linked with the universe as an unfolding evolutionary process. As Carl Sagan reminds us, “We are made of star stuff. Our whole being depends on the universe.”
Big patterns are both frightening and hard to perceive. Part of the pleasure or terror involved in engagement with the natural world can be a feeling of insignificance as we recognize ourselves to be a small part of a much larger whole. Stories have been created throughout human existence to help explain the origins of life and our place in the cosmos. Models reflecting religious, philosophical, poetic, and scientific views are available, although the scientific is dominant in contemporary Western education. Based on posing questions, observation, and testing, scientific ideas are presented as theories that change when new facts are discovered. Sometimes, several theories exist simultaneously until one is proven more accurate. It is useful to remember that at the advanced level of every discipline, there are more questions than answers. Our individual insights may provide new perspectives on the stories that shape our lives.
Creation Myth, drawing by Micha Sam Brickman Raredon, age seven.
According to contemporary astrophysicists, an explosion about 4.6 billion years ago formed an interstellar cloud of gases (mostly hydrogen and helium) and dust (containing carbon, silicon, oxygen, iron, and other elements) that eventually formed our solar system. Within this swirling cloud, gravitational forces attracted dust particles from the dense gases and combined them to form solid rocks, building up massive globules called cold planetisimals. Thus, about 4.5 billion years ago, according to the geological record, the planets of our solar system were forming.1
The extremely hot proto-sun at the center of this swirling mass began to radiate heat and light into the galaxy. The planets close to the Sun, including Earth, were literally baked by this “external heat engine.” The Earth’s earliest atmosphere, created from the release of gasses from its interior due to heat and chemical reaction, lasted only a short time because of a weak gravitational field. Gradually, Earth retained a suitable atmosphere to modify temperature and allow the first life forms to develop. The chemical composition of this 40–60 mile thick gaseous envelope has evolved several times, affecting and being affected by life forms on the surface. Light from the massive fire of the Sun travels 93 million miles before arriving at Earth’s surface—a journey that takes about eight minutes. Gravitationally bound to the Sun, planet Earth rotates on its axis every 24 hours, circles the Sun every 12 months, and orbits the center of our galaxy, one orbit every 220 million years.
It is speculated that the Earth was initially composed of the same materials at all depths. However, gravitational collapse and the disintegration of radioactive materials produced an “inner heat engine,” which warmed the Earth and possibly created oceans of molten rock. As the liquid, boiling-hot surface of molten rock gradually cooled and formed a crust, the heaviest materials, like molten iron, were gravitationally drawn to the center. Through time, the Earth developed differentiated layers, unique chemically and mineralogically from inner to outer. This included a solid iron inner core and a liquid iron outer core (that together constituted one third of the mass of the Earth), a partially molten mantle, and a light rock crust, with no continents or oceans. The oldest rocks that have been found on Earth, offering evidence of these changes, are dated at 4 billion years.
Energy flows naturally from hotter areas to cooler areas, and volcanoes erupted and spewed their molten contents, including gases, solids, and liquids, full of chemicals, up to the surface. One theory suggests that this process changed the chemical composition of the atmosphere from a mixture of hydrogen and helium gas, held in by the Earth’s gravitational field, to a mixture of gasses that included water vapor, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. It is also postulated that