The Green Wave

Yesterday I found a lovely little second-hand book of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings – a slim, wood-blocked, printing-press first-edition, in fact. That means thick, creamy paper gone slightly brittle in the last 47 years, and black-inked letters that the printing-press has made nearly tangible as braille. A knock-down bargain at five bucks! Dipping into the first section, “Alma Natura,” I was transported to a field of snow and ice which Ralph imagines as a treasury of perfect jewels. These snowflakes and ice crystals, he writes, are not only ornate, flawless, and unique, but they are informed by the “enthusiasm” of a creator. This usage resonated with me immediately, but I’ve been thinking since then about what he meant.

Enthusiasm comes from the Greek root “entheos,” which means, more or less, to be en-godded (en + theos). In this sense, to be enthusiastic is to be inspired by god, or even perhaps to be god. Those snowflakes, then, are not only divinely formed, but they are themselves divine and even evidence of divinity. Perhaps my reading flirts with the outer limits of the word, but it speaks to me of the relationship between creator and created, and the sense of mutuality and even cooperation between them.

Recently I stood on a hillside in New Hampshire just as the first stars gleamed in the evening sky and I heard the unmistakable call of a whippoorwill. Who made that sound: the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower” (a creator/creative force/evolution) or the single, individual, unique bird on a branch in a tree in New Hampshire? And considering that question, does the whippoorwill sing from the past of its long evolution or from the present in its needs and desires now?

And us: when we sing or make music, who are we? Our one solitary voice, unique in all the ages of the world? Or one sound in an orchestra that has played for millennia? Are we the product of enthusiasm or the producers of it? Or enthusiasm itself?

All of it, of course. Emerson was deeply interested in enthusiasm, understanding it as the divine spark that sets things in motion. He writes of enthusiasm, “Nothing great was ever achieved without it.” And he connects it explicitly to instinct and contrasts that to reason: ” Enthusiasm is the leaping lightning, not to be measured by the horse-power of the understanding.”

For me today and perhaps for you, friend reader, it is enough to be aware of the charged space where one is all at once creator and created, past and present, a product of enthusiasm and a producer and sharer of it. In that place are we alive with snowflakes, lightning, whippoorwills, millennia, and all the music in the world – a thought that fills me with enthusiasm!