If you live on this earth long enough, you realize that you tend to attract friends who all have one particular thing in common. And I seem to have somehow surrounded myself in life with people enamored with Mary Oliver.

Mary, if you don't know (and if you don't, I should probably meet you to expand my horizons), was a poet who spent fifty years watching animals and writing down what she saw, which sounds like the most pleasant possible way to spend a life, one that I am therefore deeply envious of. She watched geese and grasshoppers and herons. She watched foxes sleep. She stood in ponds. She came to the conclusion, after all of this watching, that the natural world is a kind of ongoing curriculum — patient, unhurried, and almost entirely unconcerned with whether you are paying attention.

The syllabus is long. There are lessons in stillness, in migration, in the wisdom of knowing when to molt. There are lessons in what to eat and what to leave alone, in the intelligence of roots, in the particular genius of a bird that can navigate five thousand miles by starlight without a single existential crisis about whether it's making the right choice.

And on that syllabus, there is a recurring lesson, which I think is worth returning to.

Wild things do not perform their own experience.

John Muir, another patron saint of naturalists, knew this well.

In the summer of 1880, Muir crossed the Brady Glacier in southeastern Alaska in the company of a missionary, several Tlingit guides, and a small dog that nobody, including the missionary, seemed particularly fond of.

The dog was named Stickeen. He was described by Muir as "a queer little black animal" — a mix of breeds nobody could quite identify, long-coated, silent, and possessed of an expression of such total philosophical detachment that he appeared to be mentally somewhere else entirely. He did not play. He did not perform. He did not solicit affection or approval. He simply materialized near the expedition each morning and fell in behind them, ten paces back, and stayed there.

Muir ignored him. This was easy to do. Muir was a man of staggering enthusiasms — glaciers, lichen, the exact quality of high-altitude light — and the dog had presented no enthusiasm-worthy qualities. He was too small to be useful, too aloof to be charming. Muir wrote him off and got on with things.

They crossed the glacier all day. The weather was deteriorating, the ice was bewildering, and Muir moved fast. By afternoon they were cut off. A series of crevasses — long fractures in the glacier, their bottoms invisible, their walls slick and vertical — had turned their return route into an architectural problem. Muir searched for a crossing. He found one: a narrow tongue of ice bridging two crevasse walls, bowed gently in the middle, perhaps eight inches wide, above a drop that Muir, who was not given to exaggeration, described as sufficient to kill a person several times over.

Muir took out his ice ax. He notched footholds into the bridge, one by one, working across like a man doing very focused tile work at extreme altitude over nothing. He made it. He straightened up. He turned around.

Stickeen was still behind him, standing at the edge.

What happened next, Muir would spend the rest of his life trying to describe. He called it the hardest thing he ever tried to write. He was seventy-six years old when he died and still wasn't satisfied with it.

The dog looked at the bridge. He looked at Muir. He began to cry — not whimper, not whine, but cry, in the full sense of the word, with a depth of expression Muir found almost unbearable to witness. He paced the edge. He lay down. He got up. He went back to the edge. The terror, Muir wrote, was total. It was the most completely afraid he had ever seen any living creature, and he had seen a great many living creatures in very difficult circumstances.

There was no way around it. The light was going. Muir called to him, cajoled, reasoned — none of which the dog understood, but all of which he seemed to appreciate as gesture.

And then Stickeen stepped onto the bridge.

He moved the way Muir had shown him, front paws into the notched footholds, then back paws, inching across the bowed spine of ice above the void, trembling so badly that Muir could see it from the other side. He did not stop. He did not look down. He moved with the total commitment of a creature who has decided a thing and is now simply doing the thing.

He reached the other side. He touched solid ice.

And then Stickeen went completely to pieces.

He sprang into the air. He screamed — Muir used that word, screamed. He ran in wild circles with a joy so extravagant, so embarrassingly large, that Muir stood there watching with the distinct feeling of a man who has stumbled into someone's private moment. Stickeen leapt. He spun. He made sounds that Muir could not categorize. He was not celebrating. He was not performing. He was simply allowing the joy to move through him at full voltage, with no resistance whatsoever, until it was finished.

Then he shook himself, sniffed the ice, and walked calmly beside Muir back to camp.

Here is what I think Muir understood, standing there on the glacier with ice in his beard, watching the dog lose his mind with happiness: Stickeen had no apparatus for managing his own experience.

The terror had been total. The joy was total. There was no editorial layer, no internal voice monitoring the display, no self-consciousness suggesting that perhaps this level of emotion was a bit much for the situation. The thing happened, and the creature responded to the thing that happened, not to some carefully modulated version of it. The experience arrived, moved through him completely, and was done.

This is, when you think about it, astonishing. We have built entire civilizations on the premise that the correct response to strong feeling is to sand it down before it reaches the surface. We call this maturity. We call it professionalism. We practice it constantly, with great effort, and we get quite good at it, and then one day we notice we have put two feet of insulation between ourselves and our own lives and we aren't sure exactly when that happened.

The dog on the glacier is not the only corrective nature offers. But it is a particular one. The lesson isn't bravery, exactly, though it looks like bravery. It isn't even joy. It's something prior to both — a willingness to let things register as they actually are, at the scale they actually are, without immediately filing them down into something more manageable.

Mary Oliver ends “The Summer Day” — her most famous poem, the one everyone quotes at graduation — with a question. She asks what you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.

People tend to read this as a call to adventure, to ambition, to doing more. I no longer think that's the whole of it. I think she also meant something quieter: are you actually inside your own life while it's happening? Are you feeling what there is to feel, in the wild, precious proportions it deserves, in the moment it arrives?

Nature teaches many things. It teaches patience, relationship, when to migrate, and when to be still. But this particular lesson — to meet what happens with the full measure of what it is — may be the hardest one for us to learn. Not because the knowledge is complicated, but because we have spent so long, so carefully, unlearning it.

Stickeen knew. He was a small, unremarkable dog on an Alaskan glacier, and he was genuinely, absolutely right.

John

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