Wonder Can Survive an Explanation
By H.R. Zimmerer
Knowing the name of a tree changes what I see. A shape that used to belong to the general category of trees becomes particular. I begin to recognise it elsewhere. I notice the leaf differently, pay attention to its bark, wonder why it grows in one place and not another. The name has not closed the experience. It has given me a way to return with better questions.
This is why I have never entirely understood the fear that explanation will empty the world of wonder. Learning how something happens does not make the happening ordinary. A bird finding its way, water moving through a landscape, the arrangements inside a flower: understanding can make these things more astonishing because it gives the astonishment something precise to rest on. I do not need to keep the world vague in order to love it.
There is, however, a kind of explanation that is really an announcement that we have finished looking. We know the name, so we move on. We have a phrase that sounds comprehensive, so the living thing becomes an example of the phrase. That can happen with scientific language, spiritual language or the kind of confidence that travels very well in a short caption. The difficulty is not knowledge. It is mistaking a useful account for the whole of what exists.
A tree has a species name. It also has this particular history: the branch broken by weather, the shade that falls from the building beside it, the place where an animal has passed. I can know more about all of those things without exhausting them. Looking carefully reveals how many details a general explanation has necessarily left out. The world is not obliged to become simple because I have found a sentence about it that I enjoy repeating.
I think this matters when we write about forests and connection. It is tempting to make every root part of a single generous family, every underground exchange an assurance that the natural world behaves as we wish human communities would. Some fungal networks do connect plant roots. But a 2023 review by Justine Karst, Melanie Jones and Jason Hoeksema cautioned that widely repeated claims about common mycorrhizal networks often go beyond the available evidence. Particular relationships and experiments cannot support every story we have attached to them.
I do not find that correction disappointing. It gives the forest back some of its freedom. It need not confirm my favourite account of kindness, kinship or hidden intention in order to be worth attending to. There are relationships to investigate, questions to keep open and details I have not yet learned how to notice. A beautiful idea becomes more interesting to me when it can survive being examined rather than requiring protection from a more careful question.
Nor does care with evidence forbid a spiritual response. I can experience a place as sacred without pretending that the feeling is a laboratory result. I can understand it through faith, memory, philosophy or a private sense of connection while remaining clear about which kind of understanding I am offering. Those experiences do not become more sincere when I attach a scientific claim that cannot bear their weight. I would rather say what I actually mean: this place moves me; I feel less separate here; I do not yet have all the language for what that means.
There is a generosity in admitting that the encounter may exceed our account of it. It leaves room for another person’s knowledge, another tradition, another afternoon spent paying attention. It also leaves room for correction. I can discover that I was wrong about something without losing everything the place has meant to me. Reverence does not have to depend upon never revising an explanation.
That is the kind of uncertainty I want the poem to hold. Not a refusal to know, and not the suggestion that every possibility is equally supported. A willingness to learn without demanding the last word. I can name the tree and still stand beneath it for a while. The name has helped me find the beginning of a relationship. There is no particular reason to hurry towards its end.
Further reading
- Karst, Jones and Hoeksema, 2023 review of common mycorrhizal-network claims – a useful distinction between documented relationships and broader popular interpretations.
- Nature’s Notebook documentation, USA National Phenology Network – an example of learning about familiar living things through repeated, specific observation.
A Little Less Certain
I can name the tree.
That is a beginning. It does not tell me
what the wind has done to it,
or how many lives
have passed through its branches. I know which way the stream runs.
I do not know
everywhere its water has been. The more closely I look,
the less I want
to finish explaining. There is room for knowledge
and for the pause
that comes after it. I would rather stand here
with a question still open
than mistake the edge of what I know
for the edge of what is real.
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