Poet Dana Gioia describes the experience of beauty  in his talk “Why Beauty Matters,”  first as “an unexpected slowing down  to saturate ourselves in a...phenomenon.” The writer of Psalm 104 imagines God in terms that feel like slowing down: covered “with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent.” Gioia distinguishes beauty from prettiness:  “We see beauty in a hawk swooping down to seize its prey,  in the swirling cone of a tornado,  or in a thunderstorm....” We kids who marked birthdates before or after Mount Saint Helens find complicated comfort in the psalmist's lines: “Who but looks down to earth, and it trembles, but touches the mountains—they smoke,” Gioia describes us feeling joy: “a complex emotion...unlike pleasure...  beyond our power to summon, control, or possess.”  Then, “a heightened awareness of the shape...of things.”  The psalmist continues: “When you send forth Your breath, th...

When we were kids, Dad woke us up  and we would read the Psalms  before breakfast. We did this enough for lines of King James's English, Such as “He scattereth hoarfrost like ashes....” to still run through my mind when frost collects on wire fence and north facing slopes, Though Psalms sing of relatedness and praise They hold together the absurdity of human consciousness  and the complicated otherness of God. Robert Alter's translation of Psalm 88 says— “Why, Lord, do You abandon my life,  do You hide Your face from me?” The psalm then ends— “You distance lover and neighbor from me, My friends—utter darkness.” It was this vision of darkness that first renewed the Psalms as poetry to me.

Feet wander  through the park. We pass the swings, the picnic shelter two skateboarders. Eyes squint to make out a birch tree silhouette  against the clouds. Against the bright white silence of the sky.

We walk through loneliness and fight  these broken battles in our brains. Fear strangles light  and chokes the air. We inhabit sorrow, darkness, toil; Oppressed by what we choose and do not choose. Death promises relief And drives all other thoughts away, We hunger, thirst,  and wander to not be alone. And yet we breath and taste  and make and come to know.

Qoheleth, the ancient Hebrew author of Ecclesiastes, by tradition “son of David” —to whom traditions trace the Psalms— writes: “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting; for this is the end of everyone, and the living will lay it to heart.” Something in that sounded wise  as I baled straw at night —an air-conditioned tractor cab, the itching chaff outside— “Do not be too righteous, and do not act too wise; why should you destroy yourself? Do not be too wicked, and do not be a fool; why should you die before your time?” Somehow Qoheleth holds this all together in ways friends' faces tell me I'm not doing  when I try to observe how true this is to life: “Like fish taken in a cruel net,  and like birds caught in a snare,  so mortals are snared at a time of calamity,  when it suddenly falls upon them.” But it seems possible to overemphasize  discontinuity between this teacher and the prophets...

Life seems as apt to break as to enlighten us.  This agony, through which we see some possibility, We experience more as sorrow,  than insight. Albert Camus begins “The Myth of Sisyphus”— “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem...suicide.”  Human longing for unity and reason;  the inability of the world to deliver. “The absurd,” he wrote, “is born of this confrontation between the human need  and the unreasonable silence of the world.”   Camus rejected suicide and leaps of faith,  both of which he thought denied one side or the other of this truth. In “Man's Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, said—  “...each man is questioned by life;  and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life;  to life he can only respond by being responsible.”  Frankl said we experience meaning— “by creating a work or doing a deed;  by experiencing something or encountering someone; a...

Wenatchee River, Leavenworth, Wash. The smell of trees And memories seep through the snow, Sheer moonlit peaks Faces obscured by valley mist, The slivered light of stars reflected in a stream, Towns, houses, barns Shed pools of light by silver roads, Bare river trees And orchard rows slip past half known.

So much of life we face alone. So many holocausts  and self-medications So much of our existence is more chaos than creation, So much of our experience more mental illness than stability. So many saints are rascals in disguise So many forest fires and volcanos so few uncomplicated childhoods  So many good intentions  cause so many kinds of harm. Is everything we try to say an exercise in wishfulness? A meaningless attempt to wrest  some meaning from the arbitrary fury of the world?

When Tina asks – “Why stay alive?” Some answer as though she's asking, “What are the benefits?”  They say, “Surviving makes you stronger,”  or “God's teaching you something,”  or they try to find some other silver lining. Some answer as though she means, “What's happening?”  They say, “brain chemistry”  or “development.”  And there's some insight here.  At a graduate discussion group,  I heard Joshua Seachris, then studying philosophy at the University of Oklahoma,  say what we want is a framework — a narrative — to make sense  of these “existentially charged elements of life.” My question eventually became whether the zebra of reality is randomness  with stripes of meaning  or the other way around. The gradual surprise is that there's anything at all.