This is a micro short film about my first Yukon spring. Or at least, the long awaited, slow arrival of it. It’s also part experiment! An attempt at stitching stop motion, drawing and video together. I was inspired by Erik Winkowski’s work. He featured one of my animations on his Substack this month - check it out if you are interested in artistic animation (thank you Erik!)
A few weeks ago, my old Canon DSLR started working again. The video mode had been dead for the last five years and I have no idea how it’s revived itself. I decided I better make use of it while I’ve got it back, so I’ve started bringing it around with me like I used to, documenting parts of my days. I feel so much more creative with it than I do with my phone. The camera turns the act of looking into something artistic and devotional. The phone just wants to be fast.
May was a month of telescopes and binoculars and the odd sensation of looking forward and back at once. Spring is quite the event up here in northern Canada and not just because the winters are harsh and the sun has started staying out until midnight then rising a few hours later. It’s also because people in the Yukon seem to be way more tuned into bird migrations. Migration is very dramatic up here. It’s very visible, audible, and undeniable. It’s felt like it’s not just something only the birders care about. Many folks up here are naturalists, biologists, hunters, fishers, land stewards, and I suppose simply spend a lot of time outdoors noticing things.
I’ve wondered this past month if people enjoy birding for the reasons I enjoy drawing. You look until looking becomes something else. They both require you to enter a significant state of attention. Presence, one might call it. I think the joy of these activities is linked to the feeling of reconnecting to all things when we transfix on a part of nature.
We feel the most alive in the presence of beauty. It reminds us of the infinity within us.
— John O-Donohue
The art of spacetime
Now, all this birding and watching nature through magnified lenses has led me to some questions. Each time I go to write one of these newsletters they turn into much deeper pondering and philosophizing than I intended. But I am trying to allow my writing to unfold however it wants to and I’ve been receiving beautiful responses in return. So I’ve let this one naturally take me where it wanted to go, and I tried not to question it. I think I’m telling you this because I feel I must warn you that this one gets kinda intense. So you’ve been warned.
Anyway, after all the binocular and telescope usage, I started thinking about how my perception of reality is assembled, moment by moment, by my mind. When I’m drawing an object, I am very connected to that object. When I spend many minutes looking at a bird on the water through a telescope, I feel close to that bird. Perhaps my mind almost feels I am that bird. I wonder if this is what neuroscientist Anil Seth meant when he referred to consciousness as, “the controlled hallucination our brains use to make sense of the world”? Is consciousness the strange awareness at the centre of everything I know? How does it relate to time and space and the universe and intuition? I set out to answer some of these very, ahem, easy to answer questions this month. I suppose this is what happens when you have 21 hours of daylight!
I couldn’t remember what I learned in physics class so I started with the only physicist I could think of: Einstein. Bare with me while I remind you of his general theory of relativity, which showed that time bends around mass. The discovery that mass bends spacetime was a huge deal because it shattered how we thought the universe and reality worked. (I forgot that spacetime is a word! Woah! I keep accidentally calling it timespace.) Whatever you want to call it, it’s the weave of space and time into a single, flowing field. Einstein said it isn’t just space and it isn’t just time, it’s both, braided. It slows and bends and ripples and curves around massive things like black holes, stars, and planets. And that bending is what we feel as gravity. The greater the mass (like a planet), the more spacetime curves around it, and the slower time moves near it. So essentially, our experience of time can change depending on where we are, how fast we're moving, and what's around us. I also wrote an essay on clock time vs. evolutionary time and our perception of it as humans here.
I think I feel so moved by the idea of spacetime because it’s as poetic as it is mathematic. It implies that presence, literal physical presence — something being there — shapes the flow of time around it. I heard the poet David Whyte once remark that presence slows time down, a sentiment that first sparked my wondering about presence as a kind of gravity. And I find it interesting that we use the word presence in two ways: to refer to being somewhere in time and space, as well as being fully in the moment. There’s physical presence (the kind you can measure) and then there’s presence as attention (that can’t be measured but can be felt?). Both have a deep gravitational weight. In physics, presence occupies space and exerts gravity. In life, a person or being who is exuding presence also carries a grounded, gravitational energy. In my experience on the earth, presence is what gives depth and meaning to my moments. It’s what I feel fully. So metaphorically, and maybe even more than metaphorically, is presence the soul’s version of mass? Isn’t it what makes time feel richer and denser? When a person is fully present, can their “gravity” be felt? Just like a star warps the spacetime around it? I think of people who hold deep stillness; the monks and meditators and grounded, peaceful people and animals of the world. It’s as if their presence has the capacity to change time for everyone around them, isn’t it?
I’ve had intuitive pulls towards places and people so strong they’ve made me wonder if there’s a kind of physics at play I don’t understand. Plus, the idea that people emit energy or that there are fields of relational force between beings is not just a new age or wellness buzzword. It has roots in physics, indigenous cosmologies, and human experience alike. The trouble is, the language we use to talk about it has been flattened either into parody or spiritual jargon that loses the nuance and legitimacy these ideas deserve.
Have you ever felt wondrous intuition and force fields so strongly that they feel like a kind of gravity? Can you remember any moments where time felt like it expanded or slowed down?
The strongest gravitational force in the universe?
There is a widely circulated letter attributed to Einstein (although the attribute has yet to been proven or disproven). In the letter, he writes: "There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others... This universal force is love." To me, it does feel like love isn’t just a sentiment, but some sort of fundamental force just as real and powerful as gravity.
The capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn to love.
— Oliver Sacks
Sometimes I write letters to myself, a practice I learned a few years ago from the legendary Liz Gilbert. She now has a whole Substack community called Letters from Love that is dedicated to this practice. The voice that comes out when I write from the universe or “love” has an entirely different tone than the one I typically write from in my journal. The voice is much wiser and more direct.
Last week I wrote: Dear universe, what would you have me know today?
Here’s what came out:
Remember that you are a small aspect of a large planet and even larger universe. Allow for new possibilities everyday and make yourself available to these moments. As Mary Oliver puts it, you will be saved by the beauty of the world. As your knowledge of what’s around you increases, the world you observe is larger, more intricate and more alluring. You can root yourself like the aspen and be marked like their bark. Joan Didion said every day is all there is. Or as Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I don’t say this to put pressure on you to live everyday adventurously and utterly blissful. Some days all you’ll do is lie around and eat a sandwich. I don’t remind you of this to motivate you to be so productive everyday that you’ll go achieve great things. The only achievement I hope for you is the achievement of enjoying your life and understanding the improbability of being born a homo sapiens on planet Earth. You can remember that you are a small, temporary creature that is made of the same force Dante called l'amor che move il sole e l'artre selle, “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Let the flow of life live through you.
After I wrote out the majority of this essay, I finally understood what I was trying to get to the bottom of. I have been feeling that love, consciousness, soul, physics, gravity (the list goes on) are not separate phenomena. They might be interwoven expressions of one underlying principle, one force, whatever you want to call it. I think of the astrophysicist Natalie M. Batalha saying that when we learn that the atoms that make up our cells were manufactured in the cores of stars, empathy grows because you understand the connectiveness not just of all humans, but of all living creatures.
You are made of the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Behind the scenes - creative process
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