A tender painted poem celebrating the wilderness and our capacity for love, trust, and hope; Emily Dickinson's uncommon life, illustrated; John Muir

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 email digest of the daily online journal [Brain Pickings]( by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — Bertrand Russell on the love of truth, the truth of love, and the two pillars of human flourishing; Sappho's timeless ode to what comes after heartbreak — you can catch up [right 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 fourteen years, and every little bit of support helps enormously. If you already donate: THANK YOU. [The Unwinding: An Uncommonly Enchanting Painted Poem Celebrating the Wilderness of the Imagination and Our Capacity for Love, Trust, and Hope]( [theunwinding.jpg?fit=320%2C398]( “Some dreams aren’t dreams at all, just another angle of physical reality,” Patti Smith wrote in [Year of the Monkey]( — her exquisite dreamlike book-length prose poem about mending the broken realities of life, a meditation drawn from dreams that are “much more than dreams, as if originating from the dawn of mind.” As I leaf enchanted through [The Unwinding]( ([public library]( by the English artist and writer [Jackie Morris]( this quiet masterpiece dawns on me as the pictorial counterpart to Smith’s — a small, miraculous book that belongs, and beckons you to find your own belonging, in the “Library of Lost Dreams and Half-Imagined Things.” [theunwinding_jackiemorris1.jpg?resize=680%2C428] Its consummately painted pages sing echoes of Virginia Woolf — [“Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.”]( — and whisper an invitation to unwind the tensions of waking life, to follow a mysterious woman and great white all-knowing bear — two creatures bound in absolute trust and absolute love — as they hunt for wild dreams, “dreams that hold the scent of deep green moss, lichen, the place where the roots of a tree enter the earth, old stone, the dust of a moth’s wings.” What emerges is a love story, a hope story, a story out of time, out of stricture, out of the narrow artificial bounds by which we try to contain the wild wonderland of reality because we are too frightened to live wonder-stricken. [theunwinding_jackiemorris24.jpg?resize=680%2C453] Morris — whose art conjures forth Robert Macfarlane’s poetic spells against the impoverishment of language in their collaborative masterpiece [The Lost Words]( — begins The Unwinding with a charming apothecary label of how this potent tonic for the imagination is to be taken: [TheUnwinding_label.jpg?resize=680%2C857] Inside, there are hares that speak in koans, foxes with parasols and mandolins, nocturnal cloudscapes of enormous blue fish. [theunwinding_jackiemorris4.jpg?resize=680%2C428] [theunwinding_jackiemorris212.jpg?resize=680%2C435] [theunwinding_jackiemorris2.jpg?resize=680%2C428] While a spare, poetic story accompanies each pictorial sequence, partway between fairy tale and magical realism, the text is only a contour around one of myriad possible shapes and shadings each watercolor dreamscape invites — each years in the painting, each a consummate Rorschach test for the poetic imagination that confers upon our waking hours the iridescent shimmer that makes life worth living. [theunwinding_jackiemorris3.jpg?resize=680%2C428] In the twelfth dreamscape, titled “Truth: The Dreams of Bears,” the enchanting woman whispers into the soft warm ear of the sleeping bear: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]If I said that my love for you was like the spaces between the notes of a wren’s song, would you understand? Would you perceive my love to be, therefore, hardly present, almost nothing? Or would you feel how my love is wrapped around by the richest, the wildest song? And, if I said my love for you is like the time when the nightingale is absent from our twilight world, would you hear it as a silence? Nothing? No love? Or as anticipation of that rich current of music, which fills heart, soul, body, mind? And, if I said my love for you is like the hare’s breath, would you feel it to be transient? So slight a thing? Or would you see it as life-giving? Wild? A thing that fills the blood, and sets the hare running? [theunwinding_jackiemorris10.jpg?resize=680%2C428] [theunwinding_jackiemorris21.jpg?resize=680%2C440] [theunwinding_jackiemorris23.jpg?resize=680%2C453] Complement [The Unwinding]( with poet Mark Strand’s [stunning ode to dreams]( and Nathaniel Hawthorne on [the liminal space between wakefulness and sleep]( then supplement the poetics of the mind with the poetics of the body in the fascinating science of [dreaming, depression, and how REM sleep helps mediate our negative emotions](. Illustrations courtesy of Jackie Morris; book photographs by Maria Popova [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 [John Muir on the Calm Assurance of Autumn as a Time of Renewal and Nature as a Tonic for Mental and Physical Health]( [johnofthemountains.jpg?fit=320%2C503]( In the final year of his twenties, penniless and hungry for meaning, John Muir (April 21, 1838–December 24, 1914) left the Wisconsin frontier, where his family had emigrated from Scotland two decades earlier in search of a better life, to wander across the wilderness of his new homeland. He began recording his encounters with nature, with its beauty and its capacity for transcendence, in a small pocket notebook — the first of the sixty journals he would keep for the remainder of his life, on the pages of which he emerged as the prose-poet laureate of nature, his soulful sensibility echoing across the generations in the writings of lyrical scientists like [Rachel Carson]( and modern naturalists like [Terry Tempest Williams]( and [Robert Macfarlane](. He would live as an ecstatic lover of the wilderness and die as a founding father of the National Parks. [johnmuir_1860s_galaxy.jpg?resize=680%2C518] John Muir Growing up, the notion of becoming a writer never entered Muir’s imagination. Instead, he dreamt of becoming an inventor; then a physician; then a botanist. He took to “the making of books” only late in life, recounting: “When I first left home to go to school, I thought of fortune as an inventor, but the glimpse I got of the Cosmos at the University, put all the cams and wheels and levers out of my head.” It was during those school years that the polymath Alexander von Humboldt’s epoch-making book Kosmos first captivated the popular imagination with the notion of [nature as a cosmos of connections]( inspiring the young Walt Whitman to declare that [“a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars”]( and the young John Muir to write his address on the flyleaf of his first journal as “John Muir, Earth-Planet, Universe.” On the pages of his journals, Muir would arrive at his animating credo that [“when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”]( Still in his twenties, a century and a half before neurologists began uncovering [the healing power of nature]( Muir began discerning the immense psychological and physiological rewards of immersion in the living cosmos of nature and its uncommon salve for the various malaises, distempers, and wearinesses of body and mind we accrue in the course of living as thinking, feeling creatures in a perpetually precarious world. In one of those notebooks, posthumously collected in the 1938 treasure [John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir]( ([public library]( he writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Nature, while urging to utmost efforts, leading us with work, presenting cause beyond cause in endless chains, lost in infinite distances, yet cheers us like a mother with tender prattle words of love, ministering to all our friendlessness and weariness. In an entry from the journals he kept during his transformative time in the Sierra Mountains, he celebrates nature not only as a mental, emotional, and spiritual buoy but as a holistic sanity tonic distilled in the body. Well before Walt Whitman devised his [marvelous outdoor workout]( while recovering from his paralytic stroke, well before William James advanced his revolutionary theory of [how our bodies affect our feelings]( Muir writes: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Gain health from lusty, heroic exercise, from free, firm-nerved adventures without anxiety in them, with rhythmic leg motion in runs over boulders requiring quick decision for every step. Fording streams, tingling with flesh brushes as we slide down white slopes thatched with close snow-pressed chaparral, half swimming or flying or slipping — all these make good counter-irritants. Then enjoy the utter peace and solemnity of the trees and stars… Find a mysterious presence in a thousand coy hiding things. [margaretcook_leavesofgrass17.jpg?resize=680%2C853] Art by Margaret C. Cook from [a rare 1913 English edition]( of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available [as a print]( In another fragment from his Yosemite notebook bearing the heading “Indian Summer,” in a sentiment Colette would echo generations later in her soulful meditation on [the splendor of autumn and the autumn of life as a beginning rather than a decline]( Muir reflects on the singular, counterintuitive life-affirmation of autumn: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]In the yellow mist the rough angles melt on the rocks. Forms, lines, tints, reflections, sounds, all are softened, and although the dying time, it is also the color time, the time when faith in the steadfastness of Nature is surest… The seeds all have next summer in them, some of them thousands of summers, as the sequoia and cedar. In the holiday array all go calmly down into the white winter rejoicing, plainly hopeful, faithful… everything taking what comes, and looking forward to the future, as if piously saying, “Thy will be done in earth as in heaven!” [GardenSupernovae_by_MariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C907] Garden Supernovae by Maria Popova. (Available [as a print]( Several passages later, he adds: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]Earth hath no sorrows that earth cannot heal, or heaven cannot heal, for the earth as seen in the clean wilds of the mountains is about as divine as anything the heart of man can conceive! Couple the altogether soul-salving [John of the Mountains]( with a [cinematic tribute to Muir’s wilderness legacy]( then revisit Mary Shelley on [nature’s beauty as a lifeline to regaining sanity]( and other beloved writers on [the natural world as a remedy for depression](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( [Emily Dickinson’s Revolutionary and Reclusive Life, in a Lyrical Picture-Book from the Lacuna Between Fact and Myth]( [emily_bedard.jpg?fit=320%2C281]( “I love so to be a child,” Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) wrote to her brother when she was twenty-two. “I wish we were always children, how to grow up I don’t know.” She would go on to draw on that inner child in her [profoundest and most prescient meditations on reality]( proffered in small and staggering poems, poems that bent language into new forms of meaning, bent tradition into new forms of truth, bent the reality of her existence into a myth, until her very life became a poem — a contour of truth on a canvas of interpretation. Out of that lacuna between fact and fiction rises the wondrous 2002 picture-book [Emily]( ([public library]( by author Michael Bedard and artist Barbara Cooney — the story of a little girl whose parents move into a house across the street from Dickinson’s home in Amherst, the famous pale-yellow Homestead. [EmilyDickinson_Homestead_PhotographByMariaPopova.jpg?resize=680%2C680] Emily Dickinson’s home, the Homestead (Photograph: Maria Popova) When a letter is slipped under the door one day for the girl’s pianist mother — a letter containing an invitation for a visit and a pressed flower, just like those in Dickinson’s [actual and astounding forgotten herbarium]( — the young narrator is instantly enchanted by the enigmatic woman across the street, known as The Myth, rumored to dress only in white, though she never leaves her house, and devoted to a strange line of work called poetry. [emily_bedard11.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( While fictional, the protagonist of the story may well be Millicent Todd, daughter of [Mabel Loomis Todd]( — the great love and lover of Emily’s brother for the last two decades of his life (while he was married to Susan, [the great love and muse of Emily’s own life](. It was Mabel who came to the Homestead to play piano while Emily hid upstairs, sending down brandy and poems; Mabel who coined the poet’s moniker “the Myth of Amherst”; Mabel who painted the flowers Emily had once pressed into a letter in a letter, then had the painting grace the cover of the first edition of her revolutionary poems, published posthumously and edited by Mabel herself. [emily_bedard12.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( The day after the letter arrives, spellbound by this enigmatic neighbor and her otherworldly art, the little girl unspools her curiosity while watering flowers alongside her father as her mother’s piano makes the house bloom with music: [2e292385-dc1c-4cfe-b95e-845f6f98c2ec.png]“What does she look like?” I said. “The lady in the yellow house?” “I don’t know, my dear. Not many see her face-to-face. They say that she is small, though, and that she dresses always in white.” We moved from pot to pot. He plucked the wilted petals as he went. “Is she lonely, do you think?” “Sometimes, I suppose. We all are lonely sometimes. But she has her sister to keep her company, and like us she has her flowers. And they say that she writes poetry.” “What is poetry?” I asked. He laid the wilted petals in his palm. “Listen to Mother play. She practices and practices a piece, and sometimes a magic thing happens and it seems the music starts to breathe. It sends a shiver through you. You can’t explain it, really; it’s a mystery. Well, when words do that, we call it poetry.” [emily_bedard13.jpg?resize=680%2C438]( The next morning, the little girl takes her mother’s hand and the two cross the snowy day to visit their mysterious neighbor. Emily’s sister greets them warmly, then tells them what all visitors are told — that the poet cannot see them, but will listen from upstairs. [emily_bedard14.jpg?resize=680%2C389]( And then, while her mother plays the piano beneath the famous painting of the Dickinson children, the young narrator quietly slips out of the parlor and up the stairs, where she proceeds to have an unexpected and lovely encounter with the slight, birdlike, chestnut-haired reality behind The Myth. What passes between them in the final pages of this tender and soulful book is nothing less than living poetry. [emily_bedard15.jpg?resize=680%2C448]( [emily_bedard20.jpg?resize=680%2C453]( Complement [Emily]( with [This Is a Poem That Heals Fish]( — an almost unbearably lovely French picture-book about how poetry touches and transforms us — and Patti Smith’s dreamlike reading of Dickinson’s [stunning poem about how the world holds together]( then savor some inspiring picture-book biographies based on the real lives of other visionaries: [Frederick Douglass]( [John Lewis]( [Keith Haring]( [Maria Mitchell]( [Ada Lovelace]( [Louise Bourgeois]( [E.E. Cummings]( [Jane Goodall]( [Jane Jacobs]( [Frida Kahlo]( [Louis Braille]( [Pablo Neruda]( [Albert Einstein]( [Muddy Waters]( [Wangari Maathai]( and [Nellie Bly](. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving Every week since 2006, I have been pouring tremendous time, thought, love, and resources into Brain Pickings, which remains free and is made possible by patronage. If you find any joy and solace in my labor of love, please consider supporting it with a donation. And if you already donate, from the bottom of my heart: THANK YOU. (If you've had a change of heart or circumstance and wish to rescind your support, you can do so [at this link]( 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]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 [---] 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](