Pilgrim at Tinker Creek contains the kind of writing that emanates from a consciousness Erich Fromm called a "state of being." This Pulitzer Prize-winning marvel of American writing, Annie Dillard (born April 30, 1945), gives us a spell-binding observation of nature and self at the most immediate, conscious level.

"If the day is fine, any walk will do; it all looks good." Dillard's body, spirit, and mind go for a walk in Virginia's old forests.   Read more on the pleasures of walking in nature, literally and figuratively, in Thomas A. Clark's prose poem "In Praise of Walking" and Andy Goldsworthy's study of walls and their representation of our linear paths. Or jot over to my own compilation of the wonders of walking "The Importance of Walking About". Dillard's spirit spills abroad, unhitched to any double awareness that paralyzes the human mind.

She exists, walks, sees, and writes.

I'm on a little island shaped like a tear in the middle of Tinker Creek. On one side of the creek is a steep forested bank; the water is swift and deep on that side of the island. On the other side is the level field I walked through next to the steers' pasture; the water between the field and the island is shallow and sluggish. In the summer's low water, flags and bulrushes grow along a series of shallow pools cooled by the lazy current... Today I sit on dry grass at the end of the island by the slower side of the creek. I am drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle.

Blue heron by Scott Danzig. "Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?" questioned Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The originality of Annie Dillard's work from 1974 owes to how much she understood that being in nature meant relinquishing our daily self-directed focus to listen and heed acts of grace.   "It's a matter of keeping my eyes open," writes Dillard. With this intensity and close focus, there is a wonderful celebration of the small and the individual. Insects, as they go about their complex familiar lives, can easily require hours of observation. Read more in Gerald Durrell's tales of childhood nature adventures.  
   
Dillard reminds us "If I can't see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open."

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through the empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white.

I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; no one else was in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Goldfinch. Photograph by Scott Danzig. Danzig is a part-time filmmaker who fills any extra time in Pennsylvanian parks taking in what Dillard called "graces of nature." Learn more.

In A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, you will notice the immediacy of everything Dillard sees. It has everything to do with her observational and writing abilities. Rebecca Solnit, whose writing on our life narratives and the space and feeling of being lost. Reminds me of Dillard (though Solnit's subject is society, not the lack of it) wrote, "Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone.”

Reading Dillard's words in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or any of her work, is to understand the power of words to convey emotion, space, and place and the ability of wonder to open our eyes and hearts to the complexity of being, a feeling of eternal.

Nature is, above all, profligate. Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is, whose leaves return to the soil. Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place? This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.   As someone who was diagnosed with manic-depressive I don't find this offensive or unreal. It is not overly sentimental or reductive to say being manic-depressive means feeling comes too much, too fast, too often. I wonder if fellow manic-depressives poet Robert Lowell and polymath Stephen Fry would agree. Vincent van Gogh, a presumed manic-depressive who saw so much life in life, would undoubtedly concur. Extravagance! Nature will try anything once.

Whether you repel your whole self into nature like Charles Darwin, Sylvain Tesson, or Thoreau, or you beckon nature into your space like Helen Macdonald, the point is to close down the whirling parts that respond to what Mary Oliver called "life's busyness" and explore what remains.

Deer, the kind which requires a different type of seeing, "opening one's palm to the present." Photograph by Scott Danzig.

In language that echoes Walt Whitman's epic poem of all things flowing through time, Dillard writes my favorite lines in the book:

I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under the trees. But under me, directly under the weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures just as real, for whom also this moment, this tree, is "it."

It is no mystery that Dillard believes a fallen tree, un-surrounded, will make noise that the mystery of grace exists with or without us.   Dillard's words call to mind Alan Lightman who believed science is not the only avenue to knowledge. That precise "being there" moment.

The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead, you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance.

"You don't run down the present," Dillard concludes beautifully, "you wait for it empty-handed."

"So much beauty we need to look after." Courtesy of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse.

Dillard does not define her aforementioned "spiritual geniuses," so I will gather a few of my own. Read openhanded Marcus Aurelius on a "universe-worthy life"; poet Rainer Maria Rilke on seeking transformation; Maya Angelou on forgiveness and love; Simone Weil on the purity of heart and the needs of the soul.