All things great and small

Notes on awe + reciprocity

“He… who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed”

—Albert Einstein

It’s of no surprise that Julia Baird’s book, Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder & Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark — expanded from a series of pieces that the Australian journalist wrote during her gruelling battle with cancer — was a bestseller during lockdown. A blend of science and personal memoir, it’s less of a self-help book and more of an “emotional wellbeing” book, which is a growing genre of nonfiction that most books could technically be eligible for, in that the act of reading benefits emotional wellbeing, as well as mental. Anyway, I digress. (I always digress.)

Baird is on a quest “to become phosphorescent” by which she means - to find the natural sources of light both within herself and the wider world, in order to stoke hope and resilience.

“When my world imploded with loss and illness, and when I had to find and tap my own reserves, my search for what makes us phosphorescent took on a new urgency — and bought me immense beauty… [a] quest for what Emily Dickinson called ‘the light within’.”

Baird doesn’t just mean light as in — goodness, wonder, awe — she means actual light: the book is stuffed with gorgeous facts about natural objects that emit awe-inspiring ‘living light’, such as the umi-hotaru, sea flies that the Japanese harvested in vast amounts during World War II — when crushed, the dried plankton would emit a dull light which would illuminate the soldiers maps, without giving away their location.

umi-hotaru via The Japan Times (in such abundance that they would definitely give away a location)

Phosphorescence is worth reading alone for the animal facts. I’m not being glib. I think there is a glorious sense of humility and groundedness that comes from learning about beasts which aren’t domestic — just look at how relaxed and amazed an entire family is, from toddler to nonagenarian, when watching a David Attenborough doc. (Baird herself notes that watching nature documentaries can make us less irritable, more curious, creative, humble and patient. )

In a particularly lovely passage about the cuttlefish, Baird writes:

“Cuttlefish are astonishing creatures, with heads like an elephant’s, eight arms they occasionally splay then join together like a trunk, and small bodies ringed with thin, rippling fins that look like a silk shawl. They glide across the ocean floor, changing their colour to match underneath them, from gold above sand to brown and red over seaweed… Their blood is colourless until exposed to air, when it turns blue-green. They have three hearts and a doughnut-shaped brain that is larger in proportion to its body size than that of any other invertebrate.”

It reminds me of Katherine Rundell’s book about endangered creatures, The Golden Mole (newly published in America as The Vanishing Creatures), in which Rundell writes that “worm-like crustacean” “attach themselves to the [Greenland] shark’s corneas, fluttering from its eyeballs like paper streamers.” The shark is a notably more revolting beast than the cuttlefish, but both writers describe their chosen animals with similar creative curiosity and an obvious sense of wonder.

One of the most salient takeaways of the book — that feels painfully familiar to me at the moment, as I work from home, on a busy street, surrounded by multiple small children — is the rich balm of silence. Not for nothing has music been used as psychological warfare. In 1859, Florence Nightingale wrote that, “Unnecessary noise, then, is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted either on the sick or well.” Ironically, one of the noisiest places you can find is a hospital. The postnatal ward has always struck me as particularly absurd: shattered from birth (the labour usually precipitated by several nights of no sleep) the most important thing for your physical and mental health is sleep. And yet, you are kept awake all night long by phones ringing on the desk outside, patients chatting (always on speakerphone) and, naturally, multiple babies crying.

“Regarde, little darling, the hairy caterpillar. It’s like a goldden bear! Oh! Regarde! The bud of the purple iris is opening! Come quick, or it will open before you can see it”

— Colette’s mother Sido, to Colette as a child

Baird interviews Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records sounds in nature. Hempton has circled the world 3 times in 41 years and has recorded sound on every single continent except Antarctica. He says that silence is an essential need - like water, food, sleep - that was readily more available to our ancestors and is now amongst the most endangered sound. Without silence, we cannot really hear nature, says Hempton.“In nature at its most natural, it is no longer merely sound; it is music.”

Baird rightly extols the benefits of cold water swimming in Sydney’s legendary Manly Bay (who wouldn’t), but the book has plenty of moments of awe for those who don’t live a bucolic, rural existence.

“One of the more surprising findings of recent research is how commonly awe can be found: in museums, theatres, parks, ponds, while listening to a busker, or even, surprisingly, in micro doses while watching a commercial of reading a story.”

(I’m pleased to read this. I’m often moved by adverts, but then I chastise myself reflexively for allowing myself to be ‘sold to’. I am going to stop doing this!)

A guaranteed route to awe is to stand in front of something very large. The Gothics called this the sublime (amongst them, they disagreed on the necessary components of beauty vs. terror). That something very big might make you feel very small - a useful lesson in humility - is unsurprising, but the psychologist Paul K. Piff also discovered that when people stood near the skeleton of an enormous T-Rex they felt an increased sense of community. The enormous beast enabled them to view themselves differently. Not so much one, as one of. For Londoners, you could do it in front of the the blue whale at the Natural History Museum.

introducing my oldest son to the blue whale

Part I and IV on awe and savouring are notably more compelling than Parts II and III on imperfection and friendship, but even in the less unique chapters, there are some excellent anecdotes. For example, the phrase ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ was originally intended as a compliment (“Girls are not to my taste” said the future King George IV of England, in 1811. “I don’t like lamb; but mutton dressed as lamb!”). Here’s another gem: American essayist E.B. White wrote of his dog, Daisy after she died in 1932: “Her life was full of incident but not of accomplishment. Persons who knew her only slightly regarded her as an opinionated little bitch, and said so; but she had a small circle of friends who saw through her, cost what it did.”

What an epitaph.

This is a book about awe and savouring — but also an unstitching of self. A chance to “float in the Bardo”, as the Tibetan Buddhists call the passage between life and death. For Baird, that suspension is a chance to appraise, to appreciate, to re-build. To turn the worm (you) into a glow-worm (enlightened you) who knows how to discern between big problems and minor inconveniences.

“Perspective is a crucial thing. As American author Robert Fulghum wrote, ‘If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire — then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience…. One should learn the difference.’”

If parts of Phosphorescent are reminiscent of The Golden Mole, then The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance is for fans of Annie Proulx¹. It’s a short, tart, powerful book - much like the berry it is named after - by Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (best-selling author of Braiding Sweetgrass) about the awe to be found in nature, but also its reciprocity. The Serviceberry asks us to mimic the “gift economies” found in nature, to bring meaning into our exchanges. To approach things less as transactions, but as exchanges that build relationships.

Where Kimmerer lives in the countryside of Syracuse, New York, there are an abundance of Servicberries: which feel “like a pure gift from the land. I have not earned, paid for, nor laboured for them.” Serviceberries are of particular importance to indigenous cultures (Kimmerer belongs to the Native American tribe of Potawatomi) because they are a ‘calendar plant’ which fits with their ethos of eating with the seasons. “Instead of changing the land to suit their convenience, they change themselves”.

A large part of Kimmerer’s work draws from her indigenous heritage and the Native American approach to the land (in antithesis to a Western, “extractive” relationship with nature, which Annie Proulx also writes about in Fen, Bog and Swamp.) The berries are both the literal journey of the book, and the metaphor. It is about changing ourselves to suit the land; not the other way round.

The most important aspect of the gift economy is not the gift itself - the berries, in this instance - but the act of reciprocity. To give a gift, says Kimmerer, in return. For instance, you could make a pie with the berries and share it with friends. You could donate to a local land trust, so the berries continue to have suitable soil to grow on. You could water the plants. And so on and so forth. Small, positive (free) acts.

“When I speak about reciprocity as a relationship, let me be clear. I don’t mean a bilateral exchange in which an obligation is incurred, and can then be discharged with a reciprocal “payment”. I mean keeping the gift in motion in a way that is open and diffuse, so that the gift does not accumulate and stagnate, but keeps moving, like the gift of berries through an ecosystem.”

The power of ‘gift thinking’ says Kimmerer, is that it changes our relationship with an object. You are accountable for the gift. You owe it your care. “Your gratitude has a motive force in the world.” Isn’t it fun to turn things like this around, in your head? Try this one, next time you feel drained: your friend is not a burden, she is a gift. Isn’t it an honour to take care of her? (I know this is not the way of thinking now, but I’m a loyalist and I can’t stand those memes that say “sorry I’m at emotional capacity” right now. If you expect to be cared for in this world, you need to extend care to others.) Here’s another one: what if success was defined not by what we had, but what we gave away? Imagine if The Sunday Times no longer ran a Rich List, but a What They Gave Away list? That’s a list I’d rather read.

Kimmerer relays an observation by the linguist, Daniel Everett² who spent time with a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest.

“He observes that a hunter had brought home a sizeable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known, storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question - store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighbouring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed…. ‘Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother’, replied the hunter.”

The gift of reciprocity can be seen in the Free Library movement, notes Kimmerer: little wooden boxes of books on stilts, set up all over the world (you may have seen one yourself) to which people contribute books. They mainly work in villages, but I’ve fashioned my own, slightly less elegant one: every few months I put piles of books outside my house, with a sign saying TAKE ME. Sometimes I wander out, like a strange non-bookseller, and help them choose what to take. Once I put 64 bananas out there, as I’d accidentally ordered 8 bunches of bananas, thinking I’d ordered 8 individual bananas. The banana box confused people more than the books, but there weren’t any left by lunchtime.

The sharing economy becomes easier to imagine, when you recall small instances like these. You may well be doing your own: donating to the food app, Olio, giving goods to your local women’s shelter, donating old prams and nappies and cribs to the mother and baby unit, giving your time for mentoring, or charity volunteering. The ‘gift’ in the gift economy can be as simple as good will, says the author. The value add of a gift, Kimmerer’s farming friends tell her, is not really altruism. It — giving away Serviceberries, letting kids play on their hay bales — builds relationships, which means that people are more likely to come back and buy their produce. The ‘value add’ is that a commodity becomes a gift: because it has a relationship attached to it.

Human reciprocity is important, but it is the land that Kimmerer begins and ends with. Every animal and plant are capitalised: Deer, Moose, Serviceberry. It’s a subtle, effective touch, reminding us of our place in the natural hierarchy. Kimmerer is not naive about economics, she understands that our market demands manufactured scarcity. In a gift economy, explains Kimmerer, there is a feeling of abundance. What would it mean for us to adopt this as a society: to recognise that we have had enough instead of striving for more? To stop operating from a position of scarcity? She suggests that “the practise of gratitude puts brakes on hyper-consumption” could help solve climate catastrophe and biodiversity loss. It’s idealistic, but I’m always open to idealism.

I can’t honestly imagine an actual gift economy ever becoming the dominant economic model — where there is no scarcity, ever and food is shared equally among the entire planet — but Kimmerer’s right to shoot for the sky, because the way we are living now isn’t working. For the planet, undoubtedly, but for humans, too. With sharing and reciprocity comes active community; doesn’t that sound like a balm to the hyper-connected yet lonely, friction-free lives we rail against? As an ambition, it’s a hard thing to argue against.

Kimmerer admits that gift economies work best in “small, tightly-knit communities” but there are ways to build hyper-localised community, even if just in a Whatsapp group on your street (intense/insane as they have the potential to be.) The author shares a sweet story of her cousin’s family, who lived in an urban area where children were always being yelled at to keep off lawns. And so they turned their front yard into a communal garden, where they grew flowers and berries and welcomed the children to play, pick flowers, take berries home. “This is the gift economy in reach of everyone” she writes. “It’s subversive. And delicious.”

1. I was not surprised to see both Kimmerer and Proulx were connected, on a project called Wood Wide Web

2. As reported in Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift