Consider the Muskrat

'It is astonishing how many people cannot, or will not, hold still.'

John La Farge, Fisherman Spearing a Fish, c. 1895

Dear readers,

We give a special gift to summer, at least here in the United States. Summer is supposed to be a season of increased watchfulness, rest, and stillness. In summer, we think, we’ll sit lazily next to some lake, splash pad, beach, or pool. We’ll read a book for the sheer joy of it. We’ll try out that recipe we’ve always meant to try. We’ll go for more walks, drink in more quiet.

I never get to half of my summer bucket list. I don’t sit still long enough. But perhaps that’s because I store up joys, rhythms, and ideals for summer that ought to be shared with fall, winter, and spring. Perhaps that joyous feeling of summer quiet was never meant to be limited to one season. Perhaps the Sabbath feelings of summer should belong to every part of our year.

We could hike in the glorious fall colors, or picnic in a quiet park. We could spend a wintry day reading fun books by the fire. We could go find tadpoles in the spring.

Food for thought. And hopefully encouragement as we turn to the 11th chapter of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—“Stalking”—a chapter in which silence, watchfulness, and waiting are integral to one’s experience of mystery and the divine.

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Dillard starts Chapter 11 with a vision of fish.

Fish, she explains, are both bountiful and elusive. They dart out of our gaze, skirt about our fishing poles, and are incredibly hard to spot. And yet, fish can be an abundance of overflowing nets and crowded boats. “Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find.”

This two-sided, paradoxical truth—the fish both free and slippery—is integral to this chapter. It’s vital to Dillard’s whole book. We see beauty and experience the beneficence of the world. We go fishing, and walk home with our arms full. But, Dillard argues, as soon as we try to pick the mystery apart—to stare under the hood—we will bump up against things baffling and unknown. The fish will slip out of our grasp.

That doesn’t mean we cannot take time to “stalk” the truth. To ask our questions. It is part of our humanness to ask “why”: to want to understand what is, perhaps, unknowable. Dillard urges us to seek out the unseeable and wrestle with the unknown, like Moses and Jacob. Even if it doesn’t result in any world-shattering discoveries. (Perhaps especially if it doesn’t.)

And so Dillard seeks out the muskrat.

I do feel it important to say something about the word “stalking,” as it’s used in this chapter quite often. Stalking is a word that ought to make us uncomfortable. It has a predatory and menacing meaning. It can mean—as, I think, Dillard means it—“to pursue or approach stealthily.” But it can also mean “to harass or persecute with unwanted and obsessive attention.” We must consider whether our efforts to understand the world around us fall into this latter category. We ought to avoid the mentality of Audubon, who killed thousands of birds in order to capture their image on paper. To capture, objectivize, dissect: these are not healthy forms of wrestling with the unknown. They reduce and exploit in their effort to understand.

But Dillard’s vision of “stalking” is quite different. It does involve relentless pursuit (at least where muskrats are concerned). But it also requires a self-emptying and quiet that remove any internal demand in the determination to “be still and know.”

In her first few encounters with the muskrat, Dillard writes, “I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions.” Such feelings of immense inward stillness are quite rare. They often alight in moments when we encounter something unexpected and precious. I think of the hummingbird, flitting past my window. Perhaps you’ve seen a whale surface in the ocean, or caught sight of a moose feasting near a lake. In such glorious moments, the whole world grows mute. Din and dissonance cease.

“Even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating,” Dillard writes. “I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves.”

Dillard seems to be asking her readers whether such feelings are meant to be rare, or whether our own frenzied participation in 21st century existence and the market economy make such moments rare. Do smartphones, 40-hour work weeks, familial anxieties, and the like create a sort of buffer between us and the glories that would call us to sit still and listen? What are we missing out on? Could we stop saying “hello to ourselves,” and see something more?

Reading this chapter, I retort to myself, “Well, I’d love to have the time to just sit around on rocks, waiting for a muskrat to show up.”

But then, I think, I do take the time to check Instagram notifications, to catch up on email, to watch Netflix television series, and the like. So perhaps it’s my fault that I haven’t seen a muskrat lately.

The second thing that characterizes Dillard’s definition of “stalking” is her determination to leave alone—to create space. In multiple instances, she draws close enough to a muskrat to touch it, or to somehow disturb its rhythms. But she purposefully draws back.

“When I got within ten feet of him, I was sure he would flee, but he continued to browse nearsightedly among th mown clovers and grass. Since I had seen just about everything I was ever going to see, I continued approaching just to see when he would break. To my utter bafflement, he never broke. I broke first. When one of my feet was six inches from his back, I refused to press on. He could see me perfectly well, of course, but I was stock-still except when he lowered his head. There was nothing left to do but kick him. Finally he returned to the water, dove, and vanished. I do not know to this day if he would have permitted me to keep on walking right up his back.”

In this and other instances, Dillard is close enough not just to see and hear but to touch (even “kick”). But she protects that space between her and the creature she observes. That space is, in itself, an offer of hospitality. In his book Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (1975), Henri J.M. Nouwen describes hospitality as “primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy.” That free space, the space between, enables Dillard to encounter these wary, private creatures without violence or force. How different would this chapter be if she tried to seize the muskrat, to force it to acknowledge her presence? Gentleness, as the late philosopher Ann Dufourmantelle writes, is often “active passivity”: a determination to be still, to preserve room.

Making room for mystery, leaving room where we wish we could move closer, is not always easy. We humans want to “remove the veils one by one, painstakingly, adding knowledge to knowledge and whisking away veil after veil, until at last we reveal the nub of things, the sparkling equation from whom all blessings flow.” But it isn’t that simple or straightforward. I love how Dillard puts it:

“You can guess statistically what any batch of electrons might do, but you cannot predict the career of any one particle. They seem to be as free as dragonflies. You can perfect your instruments and your methods till the cows come home, and you will never be able to measure this one basic thing. It cannot be done. The electron is a muskrat; it cannot be perfectly stalked. … We know now for sure that there is no knowing.”

You can’t pin down the butterfly. But isn’t it more joyous, more wondrous, just to watch it dance?

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• This week, read Chapter 11: “Stalking.” As you read, consider the following questions:

• Do you struggle to sit still and do nothing? Why? Is it a practice you’d like to develop?

• Are there questions—about nature, existence, God, et cetera—that you crave answers to? What do you think of Dillard’s assertion that “we know now for sure that there is no knowing”?

• For this week’s outdoor challenge: try to spend four hours outside. In that time, pursue one detail, or one creature, for an extended period of time. Watch the movements of a tree. Follow a duck’s movements across a pond. By paying attention to this one thing over a longer period, what do you learn? How are you challenged?