Here is how we wonder

Rebecca Elson, nature storytelling, and the awe of science

I often wonder what I would have been like as a scientist. As a child and pre-teen, the barriers between what I now consider wildly different disciplines were nonexistent. Stomping through the woods, I was a biologist, marveling at the stubbornness of green things; I was an astronomer, on late car rides; observing the weirdo actions of grown-ups around me took as much diligence as any psychologist today. Somewhere, there is a version of Maika who loved her universe enough to learn it inside and out.

Kaya Panthier – Argosy Illustration Editor

Then one day, I… was no longer. I chose the arts. I would never regret that decision, but some part of me looks back on the first time I saw plant cells glowing beneath the microscope and wonders. What if she went that way? There seems no time for wonder in my life of literature and stage politics. The science of the natural world, too, seems impossibly out of reach: unfamiliar language, formulas, and theories cocooning the magic of scientific concepts my peers in biology and physics know intimately.

 

This is why poetry and nature-writing—storytelling—is as critical today as a bridge between worlds. Creative writing, to me, can do what I feared I could not do any longer: evoke the wonder of experiencing the natural world.

 

Rebecca Elson (1960–1999) was an astronomer and poet who lived 39 years before returning to the stars. Passing unfairly young from a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left behind 52 academic publications and one posthumous poetry collection: A Responsibility to Awe. I had the privilege of reading some of her poems and fell in love with the way Elson blends scientific concepts such as dark matter with the sensory experience (and titular awe) of these phenomena. We cannot see dark matter—we know it is there, supporting our galaxy, invisible, all around—so instead a single poem (the titular Dark Matter) focuses on the metaphor of a spinning leaf suspended over a lake by an invisible, gossamer thread. It is beautiful in its simplicity.

 

Many of her poems are like this. Exploring relativity, numbers, the moon, the ocean, balloons full of helium (“A little bit of pure Big Bang”), her family, and the thousands of ways we are all connected. Eloquent, sometimes confusing, and beautiful, ideas slip just out of reach and invite a brief experience of a universe that is much larger than we can ever fully understand.

 

Science and poetry have potential to be deeply, intimately connected. Both are the result of a question, or an urge: to understand the world around us. I write to learn myself better. I write about the ways I am connected to the world and the people around me. And after exploring nature poetry as Elson writes it, I am reminded of where my own curiosity started. 

 

It may be too late to switch majors and join the enviable students romping around in Waterfowl for academic credit (I meant that. I wish I were you, just a little bit), but the beautiful universe is still there waiting to be explored on anyone’s own terms. Hopefully, with my words, I can share some of that magic.



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