There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell. The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself—forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous.
Reverence toward the world can come with the belief that it is God-bearing. The wheatgrass stem bears the charge of the sacred. Here is sufficient impetus for a careful, courteous attentiveness to things that might be expected to end in an awful silence, the eye and feeling swallowed by root system, leaf shape, feather colour. But often some contemplative writers […] appear to pull away from such a gaze with troubling quickness, their inspection transmogrifying into rumination on essence or the web of being or bolting into the language of piety and praise. Their looking seems not wild and helpless enough, seems too nicely contained in understanding; it travels into the world only far enough to grasp the presence it anticipates; it appears to lack the terror of ecstasy. If you look hard enough at the world, past a region of comprehension surrounding things, you enter a vast unusualness that defeats you. You do not arrive at a name or a home. Look at a meadow long enough and your bearings vanish. The world seen deeply eludes all names; it is not like anything; it is not the sign of something else. It is itself. It is a towering strangeness.