If we spend “every waking minute saying hello to ourselves” we’ll never learn a thing.
But the goal has stayed with me like a subliminal voice: “You have 5 more pieces to write on Tinker (or is it 6?)” And so as my arm heals enough to type I decided to simply say what’s on my mind, and any gracious reader who is with me thus far may stay to the end.
The chapter at hand this month is, simply, “Stalking.” It is masterful. As always, Annie takes time and gives herself to the subject. In particular, she stalks muskrats. She learns how to be still and stealthy so she can be close to the creatures for minutes on end. She once got close enough literally to step on one. Another time the muskrat appeared next to her unexpectedly, so close “I could have touched him with the palm of my hand without extending my elbow.”
One thing I love most about Annie’s writing is how she ties the whole world together. My expression for this: “the world is of a piece.” A similar idea says we are all so connected that even with 8 billion people it takes only a few “I know her, she knows him, he went to school with him, he used to work with her uncle” until you are shocked to find a connection.
Same with life: it is all of a piece. I’ve been accused of interjecting random notions in conversation, except they were never random to me. I will see shades of connection to some story and feel compelled to blurt them out. I don’t always lay the groundwork and make the connection like Annie does.
This chapter has many of those, one being Moses on Sinai. Stalking, says Annie, is necessary if you would know reality. God was not readily known to Moses – or anyone. Indeed, we are hardly readily known to ourselves! This Annie points out with an adjoining reference to the 1927 physics discovery of Indeterminacy. The heart of life is endlessly elusive. We won’t find the secret of things easily. Stalking is involved. A life time of it.
But this brings me full circle and reveals my wont for the seeming random. During the recent holidays I knew I was overdue for a Tinker piece, and I wondered if there was a connection to Christmas in the book. Of course there is I thought, laughing at myself. All the world is of a piece!
There are several connections but I will try to work with only one, itself multi-layered. Annie insists that self-consciousness is the enemy of learning. If we would stalk, we must forget ourselves: how we look, what it will cost us in self-respect. So, if we would learn – if we would stalk – we have to get over ourselves. We may have to crawl through the grass and sit motionless. We may have to stoop down to the creature’s level. We may be uncomfortable and bear all kinds of indignities in pursuit of the goal.
Christmas? You have to wonder how on earth Mary died to self-consciousness. Imagine the rolling eyes, the scorn, the very understandable mockery of her strange story. “The baby came from God, Mom. Honest!” Yet she let go of herself and did as she felt she must. Same with Joseph, that easily neglected character in the Nativity. What a man. He willingly abandoned self-worry so he could do what he knew he must do. In forgetting themselves they became players in the deepest reality the world can know.
Behind it all is Francis Thompson’s timeless picture of God as the “Hound of heaven.” This self-consciousness of which Annie speaks? God has nothing of it! He is free of selfishness because he is completely real. The earliest Christian theology says that in the incarnation God “emptied himself.” He stepped out of Himself, He stooped, He took on human flesh.
Ever tried to don someone else’s ill-fitting and misshapen clothes and imagined what it would be to walk in public? Impossible. The self-awareness would be mortifying. In the Christmas story God took on the clothes of a human.
That’s Tinker Creek at Christmas. Stalking, coming in a way we would easily miss if we weren’t paying attention. He displayed no self-consciousness and required of us, if we would know reality, that we abandon our own selfishness and pride.
For self-consciousness really is the “ish” of selfishness gone amuck. It is indeed the bane of our age, and of any life. And at Christmas we learn again – if we have ears to hear – to be “imitators of God” and let it go.
All the world really is of a piece.