The Sunday Letter #20: Signs
In her wonderful memoir The Smallest Lights in the Universe, the astrophysicist Sara Seager explores her work in the exoplanet field alongside the process of grief and loss after the death of her husband. It’s an extraordinary memoir, filled with clear, lucid writing that makes so many of the out-there (in the literal, physical sense of the word!), impossible concepts of physics and planetary science seem both graspable and comforting. Like something you can understand and exist alongside quite comfortably as long as you breathe in and relax. Understanding what light actually means when it’s coming to you from 12 billion light years away? Max Planck? Schrödinger’s cat? The double slit experiment and wave particle duality? It’s okay. It’s okay. You can hold all of these things even if you only understand them a little. Just like you can hold grief and let it remake you even as you only understand a fraction of it. I find this memoir, and Sara’s work, so extraordinarily comforting.
At one point in the book, when talking about her search for exoplanets that could sustain life, she goes into detail about deconstructing the assumptions around the “Goldilocks Zone”—that magical distance from a nearby star that a planet must maintain in order to have a surface that allows life. Things like water, breathable air, certain temperatures—all of these things have to be present in order for life to exist and thrive.
Or do they?
We calculated how much of a particular gas needed to be present in an alien atmosphere for us to detect it with a future space telescope. Then we determined how much biomass would need to be present to make that much gas, factoring in the destructive power of those same ultraviolet rays. If a planet would need trees ten miles tall to accumulate enough oxygen for us to see it, then we could eliminate it as a place we might look for life. Well, probably eliminate it. Maybe there is a planet with trees ten miles tall. Maybe there is a planet with trees that walk. Maybe there is a planet where the trees are kings and queens. — The Smallest Lights in the Universe, page 143.
I love this. I love it because it is methodical and also humble, steadfast and also ready to turn on a dime into that vast space of unknowing. Here—this is what we know about the world. In order to understand things, we’ll move slowly from here to there and expand our knowledge. But we also know that anything could change at any moment. Even the things that we understand might one day turn out to be wrong.
Elsewhere in the book, she talks about science as a “constant discipline of catching up”. The long, slow process of moving three steps forward and two steps back, of existing in a space of knowledge and also hope, building a cathedral of stone and also air and light, solid ground and also possibility. We don’t know what we don’t know. And what we know is always changing. We know Saturn in a different way than Galileo knew it, even though the fact of the planet remains the same.
Years from now, we’ll know our universe in a different way than we do now. We’ll probably understand light in a wholly different way as well.
Hilarious! we might say two centuries from now. Look at all the backwards things they thought in the twenty-first century. Can you imagine, thinking you were the only planet in the universe? Thinking you were there in the midst of nothing, all blue and green and swirling beauty spinning there alone?
At the tail end of my time in Scotland, I went to the Isle of Skye. Jess had gone to Skye on a weekend tour when we were students together in St. Andrews. I hadn’t been able to go at the time due to finances, so I listened hungrily to everything she said about it when she returned. It was lovely, she said. Quaint and beautiful and magical and just so very nice.
When I was back in St. Andrews myself this fall, I decided to go on my own journey to Skye. It felt like a nice end to my time in the country, and as the time came closer to this mini adventure it felt more and more like a fitting pilgrimage, as though I was following in Jess’s footsteps in some way. By this time I couldn’t remember exactly what she’d done on her tour—where she’d gone and what she’d done, aside from her stay in the main village of Portree. But that was all right—the point wasn’t to exactly retrace her steps, but to follow in her memory and make new memories of my own. So much of my time in Scotland, as it turned out, was about making new memories of my own.
In the days leading up to Skye, I went on other trips. I went to Inverness at the start of that week, and then travelled back down to Glasgow and Edinburgh for a night before catching the bus up to Skye. While on the train from Inverness to Glasgow, I listened to a podcast featuring Laura Lynne Jackson. She spoke, again, about the importance of asking your loved ones who’ve died for signs. My whole Scotland trip had been awash in signs on a lot of levels, but that day on the train it hit me all over again.
Okay Jess, I said as the green hills and trees flew by. Show me you’re around. Especially as Skye is coming up. Show me a blue butterfly.
Then I went about my day. The train ride to Glasgow was long (as with most UK train rides, it included a delay outside of one small Highland town due to problems with the track signals—long live the UK train system!) and uneventful and my journey within Glasgow to see friends was longer still. (Did I see a Tim Hortons in Glasgow? Yes. Did I perform the time-honoured Canadian tradition of visiting said Tim Hortons only to use the bathroom? Also yes.) I passed a few souvenir shops in Glasgow and looked in every window, searching for a blue butterfly, even though I know that’s not how it works. You have to put your request out into the universe and let it come to you.
But even this dedicated searching yielded nothing.
Eventually I left Glasgow after seeing friends and got on another train, this time to Edinburgh. By the time I arrived in Edinburgh and dragged my suitcase to my (much farther away than I’d anticipated) hotel I was exhausted. But I was also hungry.
First I tried to see if an old favourite restaurant was still in operation—I called the number on their website and found that they were closed for renovations. Then I dragged myself downstairs to the hotel bar, only to sit on a weirdly shaped arm chair for a few minutes and look at the snacks on the bar menu and realize I needed something more substantial. So then I dragged myself outside and walked to a nearby Turkish restaurant. (Edinburgh has lots of hills, so the “four-minute walk” promised by Google Maps was about twice as long.) When I got there, the nice man at the door informed me that they were full.
So off I went, again, into the dark cold of the city. I wanted very badly to go back to my hotel and shower and go to bed, but I needed to eat. So I climbed another hill and found another restaurant. An Indian one, this time, tucked in the basement of an old Georgian building. They had space. Huzzah. I went where they led me and sat down at my table and ordered a series of delicious things, and I was so tired that I couldn’t focus on anything other than the table, immediately in front of me. When they came with my food I tucked in and felt the world slowly right itself with every bite.
And then, about halfway through my meal, when I’d regained enough energy to take in my surroundings, I turned my head to the left and saw this on the wall:
At another point in her memoir, Sara Seager talks about the role of intuition in her chosen field.
A lot of science, especially pioneering science, relies on intuition. You’d be surprised to learn how many of our most significant discoveries began as a hunch, as a feeling.” — The Smallest Lights in the Universe, page 57.
I love this too. To me it speaks to that vast great unknowable sense of our universe even more than the humble approach of the scientist. You spend your childhood, as Sara did, looking up at the stars and chasing that something that echoes back down to you from the overarching dark, and in the course of that chasing you come across a feeling that you can’t explain, a kind of knowing that you can’t measure or quantifiably understand, at least not yet. And that knowing, that feeling, points you somewhere in the universe and all the work that comes after is an attempt to understand why—why this direction? Why do I feel the pull here? Why am I convinced that this light will tell us something about the world?
And eventually, as it has done for Sara countless times, the work and the experiments prove the intuition right, and off science goes in another direction, bolstered by something that began, at its core, as a feeling. As a wishy-washy, woo-woo, I-can’t-explain-this feeling deep in the gut.
I find this so comforting. Even our most brilliant scientists, people who sit at the edge of trailblazing discovery, touch the unknowable nature of our universe on a regular basis.
Is it a giant stretch to go from the intuition of science through to the intuition of signs coming to you from your dead best friend? Maybe. Probably.
But also, maybe not.
The morning after the blue butterfly, I woke up early and dragged my suitcase all the way back through town to the Edinburgh Bus Station, and joined the rest of my fellow travellers at our bus tour docking bay. Our tour guide, Ashleigh, met us with a cheerful can-do attitude and enthusiasm just brimming through her eyes and smile. I fell in love with her, a little. She drove us through the Highlands (kelpies! Moors! Glens! Chocolate!) and told us stories the whole way. When we arrived in Portree on Skye much later that afternoon I dropped my bags at my hotel and headed out to the harbour. It was evening by that point, and the lights over the water and the dark ridges of the mountains against the darkness of the sky felt perfect in a way I have seldom experienced.
Oh, I found myself thinking. I could live here. I could slide in here like a hand into a glove.
Then I turned away from the water and back to the town and the first thing I saw was this display in a storefront window:
Okay Jess! I thought. I get it. I’ll go into the store.
So I walked in, and the first thing I noticed was Dolly Parton playing on the radio. (Jess loved Dolly Parton with all her heart and soul. Her favourite Dolly song was “Jolene”.)
Okay, I thought. But also: that could be just coincidence. Because as much as I want to run away with all of that dark wonderful unknown of the universe, it is still so easy, isn’t it, to chalk it all up to other things. Coincidence. Random chance.
Me, superimposing a world that makes sense over the world where I have lost my soulmate, the world that makes no sense at all.
And then I turned down another aisle of the store and saw this:
Did I cry a little, in that store? Maybe I did.
Did I leave it with a softer, brighter heart and a dangly pair of earrings that Jess would absolutely have loved? Maybe I did that too.
I did not grow up, like Sara Seager did, loving the stars. I was afraid of the night sky for a long time, pulled to words the way that Sara was pulled to light, bouncing between the desperate safety of a Catholic upbringing (you are born a sinner, but work hard and believe and even that can turn out to be okay) and the cold, hard facts of believe-what-you-can-prove science. I think the bullying that was such a large part of my childhood meant for a long time that I couldn’t stomach being wrong. Being wrong felt like being laughed at on the schoolyard all over again, and holding fast to religion was a way of trying to bolster myself against this, a kind of shield against the uncertainty of the world above my head.
And yet I wanted to believe—in God yes, but also in a larger sense of the world and the universe as having some kind of meaning, some kind of framework, some kind of sense that we were all of us being held, even in the midst of all of our atrocities. A sense that went above and beyond the God I’d been taught to believe in. A sense of the world that also flew in the face of the cold hard facts of science.
The trajectory of my life has held me suspended between these points, veering closer from one side to the other at various times and moments. I have always wanted to believe in magic, and at the same time have veered away from it too.
Yes, that heart in the window and that Dolly Parton song are messages sent just for you.
No, actually, they aren’t.
You are so small, the thoughts in my head went (and sometimes still go). What do you know? What do you think you believe?
But sometimes, belief can feel like science. And science can feel like belief. When I was on Coll last month, at one of the astronomy sessions, one of my fellow stargazers asked our facilitator, “What do you think about astrology then, and how they say that things like the moon and Mercury retrograde affect us?”
The facilitator was wonderful, and so kind. “They do affect us,” he said. “The lunar cycles, the way they change the weather—all of this impacts us in ways we both see and don’t see. Do I believe that Mercury retrograde is causing my depression? Maybe not. But ultimately, who am I to say?”
Who are we to say, indeed. Science is a constant discipline of catching up—and so too, you could argue, is life. Catching up and changing and shifting and saying I used to believe this and now I think I see the world differently and maybe I’ll see things altogether differently again in the future.
And so I sit here every week, and I think about the universe above my head and the universe of grief inside my heart, and maybe I make connections where none exist, but still the action soothes me. This movement of reaching out to a universe that exists beyond what's immediately in front of us. To a universe that perhaps contains worlds where the trees are ten-mile-high queens who walk on their roots. To a universe where anything is possible.
Remember: almost four years ago now, I thought life after Jess was impossible too. And now, here I am.
It did not surprise me, after that first night on Skye, to find delight after delight on that island in the remaining time that we had left. I was not surprised to learn that Skye is often talked of as a “friendship island”, a place with a number of monuments to friends both real and mystical. We went to see the Old Man of Storr and the Fairy Glen and the Fairy Pools and every time we stopped somewhere I wondered if Jess, long ago, had stopped there too.
Nor was I surprised when I eventually (of course) got lost in the Fairy Glen. Wouldn’t be a trip with my dearest friend without one of us getting lost at least once.
But mostly, I was not surprised to discover that my inklings of Skye-as-pilgrimage had, indeed, turned out to be correct. That intuition, that hunch. That blue butterfly. Maybe it was random chance, maybe it was me trying to impose order on a world where order feels in short supply. But maybe it wasn’t! Maybe, like Sara Seager, I was following an intuition that turned out to be right. Maybe there are threads in this world that we follow even without seeing. After all, if the universe can give us quantum entanglement, what else might be hiding from our as-yet-cloudy eyes?
Who am I kidding. There are no maybes about this for me. I like this joyful universe, this one that exists alongside and between and within the sadness and the grief, maybe even the horror. I like to think that there is magic out there that we do not yet understand, even as it hurts to hold it. I like to believe, above all else, that my dearest friend is out there guiding me to it. She of the blue butterflies and Dolly Parton and irreverent cacti. I am getting lost with her all over again, and I like it a lot. I hope it never stops.
May your own grief bring you this kind of joy too, my loves, eventually.
Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. — Frederick Buechner
As we wind down this year and begin to think about the next, I’ve been thinking a lot about this Substack of mine. I still don’t know if I know what it’s about. Grief, yes. The universe, yes. Everything—yes! In some way or another. I have so loved getting notes from you when certain things strike you deeply—when moments of connection come from things that I throw against the wall, this newsletter like cosmic spaghetti.
In the new year, Notes From a Small Planet will undergo a wee refresh. Mostly just branding things, but also maybe some substance things too. The Sunday Letter will remain, as always. But I’d like to try out a few other things too—some ways of building community, some ways of exploring paid features and what that might mean if (when?) it grows.
And so I thought I’d ask you, my favourite constellation of readers! What other things might you like to see in Notes From A Small Planet? I will confess that writing the Sunday Letter takes a lot out of me, as much as I love it and as much as it will continue. Each letter is hours and hours of work and research and rumination. So the things I’d like to add to this space would ideally be smaller things—maybe some things that are paywalled but interesting, maybe some other ways of building community. (This is what Drafts & Glimmers is currently for, but I got worried early on about posting excerpts of work-in-progress—what if people got bored—and divebombing paid subscribers with daily content even if I meant well and so that has dried up to a trickle. Should I bring it back? If you had the means to be a paid subscriber, what kind of content might you like to see?)
I could open up a chat thread about one thing or another. I could compile a weekly list of interesting space facts. (Or a weekly list of grief facts, as morbid as that might be, because quantum entanglement.) I could invite other writers to do guest posts, though that feels like a thing that only famous people get away with and I am the farthest thing from famous. I could share pictures of the Dog of Doom and list some of her weekly adventures. (#SitkaStories! It could be a thing, right?)
What do you think? What might you be interested in seeing from this space as we move into the new year? You can send me an email or leave a note in the comments or get in touch via that other place where I’m sometimes-okay-often online. It would be wonderful to hear from you. <3
Currently Reading: Unattended Sorrow, by Stephen Levine
Currently Watching: Nightflyers, soon-to-be leaving Netflix, catch it while you can!
Currently Eating: This vegetarian Pad Thai!
Currently Substacking: The Clearing, by Katherine May, because it is about to be winter and she is an expert on all the winter things. Check her out!
I never don't want to see pictures of Sitka. I am also just a big fan of your writing in general and am for anything you choose to spend time and effort sharing.