The art of centering; Krista Tippett reads a mathematical-existential poem about the interconnectedness of the cosmos; a Solar System quilt from 1876

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [Welcome] Hello {NAME}! This is the weekly [Brain Pickings]( newsletter by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — how Kepler invented science fiction and defended his mother in a witchcraft trial while revolutionizing our understanding of the universe — you can catch up [right here]( if you missed the annual summary of the best of Brain Pickings 2019, you can find it [here](. And if you find any value and joy in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a [donation]( – I spend innumerable hours and tremendous resources on it each week, as I have been for more than thirteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [The Art of Centering: Potter and Poet M.C. Richards on What She Learned at the Wheel About Non-Dualism, Creative Wholeness, and the Poetry of Personhood]( [centering_richards.jpg?fit=320%2C391]( Looking back on the first thirteen years of Brain Pickings, I termed my [thirteen most important life-learnings]( “fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.” But how exactly do we locate our center and master its osmotic balance between fluidity and solidity? That is what poet, potter, and manual philosopher M.C. Richards (July 13, 1916–September 10, 1999) explores in her 1964 counterculture classic [Centering: In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person]( ([public library]( — an inspired inquiry into “how we may seek to bring universe into a personal wholeness,” “to feel the whole in every part,” which popularized the now-commonplace notion of “both… and” as the non-dualistic, parallelistic alternative to the dualistic, perpendicularist “either… or” mindset. After graduating from U.C. Berkeley, Richards was offered a tenure-track position at the University of Chicago, but was soon disillusioned with the hyperfocus on standardized achievement, competitive and vacant. Just after World War II, just before her thirtieth birthday, she made a radical leap of faith and joined the English faculty of the experimental Black Mountain College. [mcrichards.jpg?resize=680%2C1354] Mary Caroline Richards at Black Mountain College (Getty Research Institute. Photographer unknown.) One of the school’s most beloved teachers, she founded Black Mountain Press with her students, teaching them the fundamentals of typesetting and publishing, and soon rose to head of faculty. She forged close friendships with [John Cage]( [Merce Cunningham]( and the famed Black Mountain Poets. Many decades before neurologist Oliver Sacks extolled [the healing power of gardening]( she lived with mentally handicapped adults in a working community based on biodynamic agriculture — the precursor to organic gardening and farming. In the 1950s, she returned to Black Mountain College not as a teacher but as a student — of pottery. The beautiful consonance she found between her two arts inspired a larger inquiry into the creative process, in a work of art and in the work of personhood. [MCRichards_pottery.jpg?resize=680%2C442] M.C. Richards: Four Virgins of the Elk Dance (Courtesy of Black Mountain College) Governed by her conviction that “poets are not the only poets” and that artists don’t leave their art at the studio, Richards explores the poetry of personhood through the metaphor of centering, drawn from the craftsmanship of pottery — a potter brings the clay to the center of the wheel, then begins the process of giving the amorphous spinning mass the desired shape. She writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Centering is a verb. It is an ongoing process… Centering is not a model, but a way of balancing, a spiritual resource in times of conflict, an imagination. It seems in certain lights to be an alchemical vessel, a retort, which bears an integration of purposes, an integration of levels of consciousness. It can be called to, like a divine ear. […] Centering… is the discipline of bringing in (i.e., of sympathy or empathy) rather than of leaving out. Of saying “Yes, Yes” to what we behold. To what is holy and to what is unbearable. But my experience tells me now that there is an important crucial stage of saying Yes to a No. For resistance also must be embraced. Not only accepting resistance but practicing it. This non-dualistic assent to other universe in all of its expressions is at the center of centering; it is also the lever by which we turn the negative into a generative place, in our individual experience and our collective aspirations. Richards writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]The hardest and most rewarding lesson has been to learn to experience antipathy objectively, with warmth. For antipathy follows a gesture of separating, and the goal, which is to be both separate and connected, requires that one move inwardly in opposite directions. Toward self-definition and toward community. Toward ethical individualism and toward social justice. It is this fusing of the opposites that Centering enables. […] In centering the clay on the potter’s wheel, one centers down, yes, and then one immediately centers up! Down and up, wide and narrow, letting focus bear within it an expanded consciousness and letting a widened awareness (empathetic) have the commitment to detail of a focused attention. Not “either… or,” but “both… and.” You can perhaps feel the inner movement of a Centering consciousness that plays dynamically in the tides of inner and outer, self and other, in an instinctive hope toward wholeness. [creation_bhajjushyam3.jpg?zoom=2&w=680] Art by Bhajju Shyam from [Creation]( — a collection of illustrated origin myths from Indian folklore. In its active practice of non-dualism, centering is thus a deepening of our understanding of reality, consonant with Nobel-winning physicist Frank Wilczek’s observation that [“you can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”]( And yet, Richards cautions, centering must not become an item on the checklist of existential achievement — the moment it ceases to be a practice and becomes an object of striving, it becomes subject to corruption and distortion: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]“Center” and “centered” have come to be fairly widely used. They tend to imply a connection with the navel, with one-pointedness, on the way to bliss, realization, and inner peace. But these are not the goals of the Centering process. For it is a continual engagement with experience, not a withdrawal from it. It begins with pain and ends with paradox. It wrestles with evil and the daimonic as it does with angels and repentance. It is an activity of consciousness, not a stage of spiritual achievement. […] I have found that Centering, like clay, … bears the future within it. For it contains a space for ongoing development and differentiation. In other words, it proves to be an open image, a vessel, holding a content that is life itself. [poem_fish1.jpg] Art by Olivier Tallec from [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( by Jean-Pierre Simeón. Writing in the early 1960s — an era marked by the scar tissue of WWII and the new-growth optimism of civil rights and women’s emancipation, of space exploration and the decoding of life’s helix — Richards sees in the notion of centering an emblem of cultural evolution, as relevant to her own time as it is, after a half-century turn of the cultural wheel, to ours: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]We find on so many fronts now, political and artistic as well as religious and economic, an imaginative thrust that goes not toward competitive violence and adversary motifs, but toward new social forms. Imagination is more and more recognized as a form of cognition. Richards defines the creative mind as the “mind that makes connections between things ordinarily thought to be different” — an embodiment of “the highest human capacity”: the [capacity for metaphor](. Echoing the stunning speech on [poetry, power, and freedom]( that John F. Kennedy delivered in 1963, just as she was finishing her book, she writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]This is what fires our hearts, is it not? To feel ourselves free to love and to live. Unbullied and unbullying. Unhaunted by a conscience made guilty by social pressures and expectations. To act from source freely. The moment we begin to act freely, we come into contact with the unknown — contact that can be a shattering shock if we are hardened, or a shape-shifting revelation if we are fluid enough to embody new forms of understanding, of meaning, of being. Centering thus becomes the locus of fluidity: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Centering… brings us what we don’t already know… We may find, yes, that yesterday is over, and we do not perpetuate old confusions. We do not cling to the savagery of nationalisms, or the shame we feel for being as we are. We stand on the shore of an ocean and the pure wind blows us fresh and we wake out of an anguish of inner conflict into a deep breath that lets us rise to our feet and in a new levity we dance. It could be said that fidelity to the processes of Centering is a path to full breathing, to a balance willingly at risk. […] The deeper we go into these realms, the more contact we make with another’s reality. The sharper the sense of pain and bliss as they interweave through the heartbreak and luck of life, the more the line between self and other may dissolve. [Lia_1200.jpg?resize=680%2C680] Art by Lia Halloran for [The Universe in Verse](. Available [as a print](. In a sentiment evocative of Wendell Berry’s short and lovely poem about [how to be a poet and a complete human being]( Richards considers what drew her to the metaphor of centering and what it reveals about the poet in each of us: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]I am an odd bird in both academic and craft worlds, perhaps because I am a poet, and thus, by calling, busy with seeing the similarities between things ordinarily thought to be different, busy with feeling the sense of relatedness grow through my limbs like a smoke-tree wafting and fusing its images, busy with the innerness of outerness, eating life in its layers like a magic cake made of silica sounds shapes and temperatures and all the things that appear to be separated stacked together in transparencies of color, and it is perhaps my vocation to swallow it whole. The expanding universe. The resilient appetite. The continuous play. The changing, changeful person, mobile and intact, finding his way on. […] For life — I am sure of this — is not transforming energy, but transforming person. Energy is the means. Being is not what but whom. It is Presence in whom and before whom we show ourselves. Let us ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it. Let us then speak to each other in our most intimate concern. [Centering]( is an intimate, universal, revelatory read in its timeless totality. Complement it with Susan Sontag’s astute distinction between [being in the middle and being in the center]( then revisit Richards’s close friend and collaborator John Cage on [the inner life of artists]( and their contemporary E.E. Cummings on [what it really means to be an artist](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2019, the 13th year of Brain Pickings, I poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into this labor of love, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and solace here this year, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [Cosmic Threads: A Solar System Quilt from 1876]( In October of 1883, a paper in the nation’s capital reported under the heading “Current Gossip” that “an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt” — a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in newspapers across the country that autumn and winter. The New York Times reprinted the report as it appeared in the Iowa paper, dismissively qualifying it as a “somewhat comical statement.” [ellenhardingbaker_solarsystemquilt1.jpg?resize=680%2C564]( Ellen Harding Baker’s Solar System quilt, completed in 1876 (Smithsonian) The woman in question, Ellen Harding Baker (June 8, 1847–March 30, 1886), was not a person to be dismissed with a patronizing chuckle. Baker taught science in rural Iowa, in an era when most institutions of higher education were still closed to women, all the whilst raising her five surviving children. She used her [Solar System quilt]( to illustrate her astronomy lectures. To ensure the accuracy of her embroidered depiction, Baker traveled to the Chicago Observatory to view sunspots and a comet — most likely the Great Comet of 1882, which had become a national attraction — through the professional telescope there. [ellenhardingbaker.jpg?resize=629%2C738]( Ellen Harding Baker (Smithsonian) Baker was born in the year Maria Mitchell — the figure who sparked the initial inspiration for my book [Figuring]( — made [the landmark comet discovery]( that earned her worldwide acclaim and established her as America’s first professional female astronomer. When Baker began working on her Solar System quilt, she was the same age Mitchell was when she discovered her comet — twenty-nine. [ellenhardingbaker_solarsystemquilt_detail1-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600] Quilt detail The quilt, crafted long before we knew the universe contained galaxies other than our own, depicts an enormous radiant sun orbited by the planets known prior to Pluto’s discovery in 1930, as a comet — one of those mysterious and enchanting celestial bodies, [extolled in poems]( and [foreboded in Medieval paintings]( — blazes in one corner. The quilt is made of wool, lined with a cotton-and-wool fabric, and embroidered in silk and wool. [ellenhardingbaker_solarsystemquilt_detail3.jpg?resize=600%2C600]( Quilt detail The convergence of the threaded arts and astronomy was not entirely uncommon in Baker’s day. Mitchell herself, while condemning the needle as “the chain of woman” and resenting the tyranny of “stitch, stitch, stitch” as society’s means of keeping women confined to the domestic sphere, believed that [the needle could be reclaimed as an instrument of the mind](. “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer,” she wrote in her diary. [ellenhardingbaker_solarsystemquilt_detail2.jpg?resize=600%2C600]( Quilt detail Nearly a century after Baker made her quilt, the pioneering astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin — who revolutionized our understanding of the universe by discovering its chemical composition and became the first woman to chair a Harvard department, having ended up at the esteemed university thanks to a fellowship established there by the Maria Mitchell Association — would pick up where Baker left off, crafting a stunning [yarn-on-canvas needlepoint depiction of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A](. In the year of Payne’s death, the artist Judy Chicago would also bring needlepoint and astronomy together in her iconic project [The Dinner Party]( which features a hand-embroidered runner celebrating [Caroline Herschel]( — the world’s first woman astronomer and the subject of Adrienne Rich’s [stunning tribute](. Baker’s quilt is available as an [art print]( with proceeds benefiting the endeavor to build New York City’s first-ever public observatory at [Pioneer Works]( — a dome of possibility for future Ellens. Thanks, [Andrea]( [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Figures of Thought: Krista Tippett Reads Howard Nemerov's Mathematical-Existential Poem About the Interconnectedness of the Universe]( [nemerov_collectedpoems.jpg?fit=320%2C483]( “A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote in [one of his most beautiful poems]( in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as humanity was coming awake to the glorious interconnectedness of nature — to the awareness, in the immortal words of the great naturalist John Muir, that [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”]( A century later, Albert Einstein recounted his takeaway from [the childhood epiphany that made him want to be a scientist]( “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Virginia Woolf, in her account of [the epiphany in which she understood she was an artist]( — one of the most beautiful and penetrating passages in all of literature — articulated a kindred sentiment: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” This interleaved thing-itselfness of existence, hidden in plain sight, is what two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920–July 5, 1991) takes up, two centuries after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, in a spare masterpiece of image and insight, found in his altogether wondrous [Collected Poems]( ([public library]( winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. [HowardNemerov_young.jpg?resize=680%2C927] Howard Nemerov [On Being]( creator and [Becoming Wise]( author Krista Tippett brought the poem to life at the third annual [Universe in Verse]( with a lovely prefatory meditation on the role of poetry — ancient, somehow forgotten in our culture, newly rediscovered — as sustenance and salve for the tenderest, truest, most vital parts of our being. [d0c1a62f-4def-419a-92b7-1609335cd004.png]( [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]FIGURES OF THOUGHT by Howard Nemerov To lay the logarithmic spiral on Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit, To watch the same idea work itself out In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn Onto his target, setting up the kill, And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs Who cannot see to fly straight into death But have to cast their sidelong glance at it And come but cranking to the candle’s flame — How secret that is, and how privileged One feels to find the same necessity Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise Without kinship — that is the beautiful In Nature as in art, not obvious, Not inaccessible, but just between. It may diminish some our dry delight To wonder if everything we are and do Lies subject to some little law like that; Hidden in nature, but not deeply so. For more science-celebrating splendor from The Universe in Verse, savor astrophysicist Janna Levin reading [“A Brave and Startling Truth”]( by Maya Angelou and [“Planetarium”]( by Adrienne Rich; poet Sarah Kay reading from [“Song of Myself”]( by Walt Whitman; Regina Spektor reading [“Theories of Everything”]( by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson; Amanda Palmer reading [“Hubble Photographs: After Sappho”]( by Adrienne Rich; and Neil Gaiman’s original tributes-in-verse to [women in science]( [environmental founding mother Rachel Carson]( and [astronomer Arthur Eddington]( who confirmed Einstein’s relativity in the wake of a World War that had lost sight of our shared belonging and common cosmic spring. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2019, the 13th year of Brain Pickings, I poured tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into this labor of love, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you found any joy and solace here this year, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now](  [Give Now]( [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. Brain Pickings NOT A MAILING ADDRESS 159 Pioneer StreetBrooklyn, NY 11231 [Add us to your address book]( [unsubscribe from this list](   [update subscription preferences](