The Art of Observation

It’s a cool midsummer evening in my back yard in Colorado. I’m 12 years old, staring into the telescope that my parents gave me for my birthday. I’m still scared of the dark and the fear hangs in the background adding a slightly acid tang to the night. The air has made my face and hands cold. I can smell the dew on the grass and the pages of the star atlas in my hands have become soft with the damp.

Through the eyepiece of my telescope I am looking at a faint fuzzy smudge called M13, a globular cluster in the constellation of Hercules. The books say that this object is a dense nest of tens of thousands of stars, but it is so far away that to me it’s just a faint patch of light. I wait and I stare. I can still hear the night around me and feel the cold and smell the air. I wait, and gradually the pupil in my eye relaxes and opens wide. The faint smudge becomes brighter and then, click! There it is! I can see them! The cloud resolves into thousands of tiny suns sprinkled like the finest salt on a black silk tablecloth. Mesmerized, I continue to stare, and after a while the yard and the cold and the damp are not there, I don’t really notice them any more. The telescope is not there, it’s just an extension of my eye. I am not there. There is just the majesty of ten-thousand suns hanging silently in space.

This is my opening.

I am 20 years old, an undergraduate at Caltech in Pasadena California. I came to school filled with (over)confidence and excitement, but physics has swiftly dealt with that. My ego is crushed by the weight of trying to take in 400 years of astonishing brilliance; the fruit of a great many minds, each of whom have walked this path with much greater clarity than I. I am learning humility and it hurts, but I have stepped onto the path.

It’s not a path that I really understand though. Not at the time. In retrospect, I can look back at this path and understand the where and the why, but at the time, it was lost in the flow. I had long since forgotten my 12-year-old self in the back yard with the Hercules cluster. On the path I was just driven by instinct and momentum. Such is the way I have lived this life and travelled this path.

Further along the path I have met my teacher. It’s a hot summer in New Hampshire and I am now a graduate student at Dartmouth College. I’ve come here to study cosmology. The big ideas and grand mystery of studying the evolution of the universe as a whole appeal to me, but this is not my fate. Instead, I fall into the study of exploding stars. I have come here intending to study the origins and beginnings of all things, and instead I find myself looking at endings. But of course in those endings, spectacular and terrible, are the seeds of new beginnings. Indeed the origin of our own flesh is in the ashes of these dying stars. We are the fruit of impermanence.

My teacher does not, primarily, fill my head with knowledge. Such book-learning is triviality. Instead, he instructs me in the practice of our art. There are the simple practices at first, learning to use our instruments. But there are other teachings too; the subtle skills of effort and patience; the art of coaxing insight from the chaos of noise balanced with the discerning wisdom to recognize delusion.

On a mountain top in Arizona he shows me the quiet art of observing. We live a strange monk-like existence, sleeping in the daylight and coming out at night to watch the sky. In a way we are cut off from the world. At night we listen to the radio broadcasts from the cities down below, but we don’t see or interact with that world. We are on an island between the world of man and the heavens. It is quiet and time is slow.

The universe is an enigma and our telescope the eye which we use to probe it. Our practice is a passive one: we cannot poke the universe with a stick and watch it move. It is out of our reach. Instead, we can only listen and watch. Every moment light from countless grand structures, which has travelled the depths of time and space for untold eons rains down upon our lives unnoticed. The grandeur that is our universe goes largely unmarked. M13 rains its majesty on my life every day, but I haven’t seen it for years. When we open our telescopes we record a tiny piece of that grandeur; a tiny fraction of that beauty is captured. It is transformed, of course. It is no longer the beautiful and weary light that crossed the void. That has been lost forever. But its journey has been noticed and lives frozen like a fly in the amber of our data.

We descend from the mountain to tell the story, but we are not the authors of this story. Our practice is not to tell the tale of our own desire. Rather our practice is to try and sweep all that away and simply to listen carefully. Our art is not the creative spark, but the way to make a space, an opening, where the quiet story of nature can be heard. Our earthly life is too loud and noisy to hear this story. We must leave that behind and travel to a distant mountain, or send our proxies out of the world entirely in order to find a quiet place to listen. And because the stories nature has to tell are alien to our human experience, we must be prepared to leave our expectation behind as well. We must also show patience. Often it is cloudy and we feel we are wasting our time, but we stay for those moments when the clouds break and the way is clear. This is the practice my teacher shows me.

Sometimes at night he tells me stories. Our practice, it seems, has an oral tradition as well. I listen to tales of the old masters, of their mistakes and their insights, of their human failings and their transcending wisdom. He tells me of his own teacher, and I discover that I am a part of a noble lineage. I begin to sense that the practice is alive, passed directly from teacher to student, and that I am becoming a part of that process. I am the latest vessel for the practice, and I’m being trained to be the embodiment of this art. Although I do not realize it at the time, my fate has led me to a good teacher, and he teaches me in that most effective of ways: by being the manifestation of his own teaching.

One day he shows a different kind of wisdom. No longer on our mountain, but back again in the noise of life on the ground he hands me a nugget of truth from outside our practice. Not a truth of the path of listening to the heavens, but a human truth about that path and how it lives in our world.

He tells me that this practice, this art, is rare. It is not practical. We serve no material goal, we further no political agenda, we make no patentable discoveries. We work solely to satisfy the whim of human curiosity. Our art exists only because human beings have a fascination with the universe they live in, but that fascination can only pay so many bills. The cold truth is that most of us who start on this path will leave it at some point, and often not out of a desire to do so, but because of the blunt hammer of pragmatism. To practice this art is a privilege, so we need to be grateful for it while it lasts, and let it go if it should leave us.

This has not been an easy lesson to embody, but it has been one I’ve tried to carry with me, bouncing from place to place as is the custom of young researchers in our practice. Walking this path does require its sacrifices, and not all of those are borne by me. Those costs are hard to count. How do you weigh the burden your path has placed on others? But these costs linger and it is not wise to ignore them. Blown by the winds of whim, luck, and fate it is not hard to see why one steps off of this path.

Now it seems that I may have found root. Soon I will be moving to Florida to join a colleague and build up a new community of practitioners. I have moved along the path and will soon become a teacher. I will have naive and brilliant and eager students and I will have to find the wisdom to show them our way. Hopefully I will have the wisdom to be grateful and enjoy it.

On the verge of this change, I find myself stepping onto another path. My karma has led me to a new practice, one which is at once wholly alien and yet also familiar. On the cusp of becoming a master, I find myself compelled to take up a new art. One that challenges me to drop it all and begin again; to find another way to clear away my expectations and make a space to listen quietly. I have only just set my foot on this path, my eye is just beginning to open. I am in the back yard again. The cold and fear are still present but this returning home has reminded me of the fascination that I forgot somewhere along the way. This new path will be hard, but this time I’m seeing it through two eyes. If all paths are one path then I have been here before and I remember it this time. The sense of return is palpable and the poetry of this moment is hard to ignore. I have some maps. I will find a teacher. I will be unmade and remade again and I will always be returning to that moment in the back yard again. That moment when the cold and the night and my self dropped away leaving just the glittering light of ten-thousand suns.