Science My Mom Taught Me

Entry for 14 May 2023 

Note: For Mother’s Day this year, I thought it would be appropriate for me to bring back the poem I wrote for my mom for her 75th birthday nearly 20 years ago, April 7 2004. (At that time, she exclaimed, delightedly, “I get a poem… and I don’t even have to be dead!”) Although she passed on eleven years ago, in 2012, and I’ve written plenty of other pieces for/about her in the meantime, this one I think best captures what she has – and continues – to mean to me. 

Further note: I’ve been going through old files lately, and last night I found the “Robert Jr” folder my mom kept about me, full of old poems and letters, along with a few photos. Amongst all this stuff about me, on small pieces of paper, I found a series of hand-written, undated affirmations that she wrote about/to/for me at one time or another. In them she wrote that she loved me, and God loved me, and that I was going to be all right and would do good things in my life. I never saw these handwritten pieces, did not even know they existed until now. Small prayers, tucked into this folder and perhaps forgotten, but still: messages, angels, blessings down the years. 

 

1. Science as Love and Relationship

 

A good place to start is that ancient photograph,

Recently rediscovered, from 1950:

 

There the two of you are, the same age

As the youngest of my grad students. 

Both of you are tall, almost toothpick thin.

He is looking at the camera, tight jeans and shirt,

Like a rebel with cause to smile.

 

But you are looking down, through large glasses,

Your face framed by billowing hair,

With toothy grin, and your arms

Awkwardly but carefully wrapped round

A very small bundle.

 

The two of you look like nothing

So much as a couple of computer nerds

From half a century in the future.

Code geeks, rolling out your first promising program,

Ready for beta-testing.

 

But the code is genetic,

The language is life,

And the program is … me.

 

2. True Science is Risky

 

Although I learned magic from my dad,

It now seems clear to me that it was you

From whom I first learned science,

To which I have now devoted so much of my life.

 

But yours was never the normal, safe kind,

Digging away at the coal face

In the mines of knowledge,

Like Disney’s happy dwarves.

 

No, not that kind, but instead

The one that goes off to Far Tortuga,

Toward distant Galapagos unknown,

In search of the evolution of the human soul.

 

For you, big ideas have never been too big:

The nature of reality; the journey of the soul;

Jung’s famous paper on flying saucers;

The archetype of the Mandala: As without, so within.

 

Instead of Aristotle … Plato’s forms;

Instead of Archimedes … Pythagorus’s numbers;

Instead of Moses’ law … the Kabbalah’s secrets;

Instead of chemistry …alchemy’s transformations.

 

Oh, you did chemistry, too, at least early on:

You would disappear for hours,

Into your laboratory at the back of the house,

Full of strange smells and odd bits:

 

Broken glass, mosaic pieces,

Rolls of wallpaper, bolts of cloth,

Cans of precursors and catalysts,

When plastics was new technology.

 

And you would emerge from your lair,

To confront your family with some new concoction,

Sometimes lovely, or quirky, or primitive;

At times, a disaster, but always something new.

 

No, for you, science has always been risky:

Working at the edge, making something new,

You have become an expert in the peril of experiment,

And I have followed you, where I could.

 

 

3. Science as Inspiration and Passion

 

Your mother (my grandmother) taught me many things:

How to travel and how to be in a new place;

The importance of hard work and getting up early;

The ninety-nine percent of sweat that makes up genius.

 

But you taught me a far more valuable lesson:

The one percent of inspiration that redeems all the rest,

The moment of epiphany, the pattern opening,

The intensity of the new connection breaking through,

 

The science of cutting to the center of the world,

Of seeing what others don’t choose to see,

Of waking to awareness when others sleep,

And the flow of following the spirit far into the night.

 

When I see these things in myself, I recognize you.

The passion of discovery is too powerful to resist,

Even if we wanted to; the daemon must be honored;

It is ours, and we must let it speak through us or die.

 

 

4. Science as Always Starting Anew

 

I find it odd that I describe my dad in a series of narratives,

But you as a set of ideas, a paradigm, a model.

There is, however, one story that is always you,

The story in which you are always re-inventing yourself:

 

Child of the Depression with a single mom;

Big city girl; prep school party-er;

Young, anxious mother and seamstress;

Small town society woman in a flat land.

 

But your life makes a strange turn: You take up philosophy;

You quit smoking just because you feel like it;

You return to religion and start teaching Sunday school;

You become a small business owner and a writer.

 

Years pass: You’re CEO of a large and raucous family,

With the habit of taking in strays (both human and animal);

And you’ve gradually evolved into a spiritual leader

Of a small but loyal group of friends.

 

Then, your life turns again:  Warned in a vision

Of the impending end of civilization, you become

A gentle survivalist and take your family

Into the mountains, like Noah waiting for her flood

 

You seal several tons of wheat into cans,

Which are still there after twenty-five years.

Well, we can’t get everything right, but now you live

In a beautiful little valley: Murray Creek.

 

Now you are matriarch to three generations and 60 acres.

A combination of Ariadne, Daedalus and Theseus,

You become a labyrinth designer and unwinder

Of ritual journey spaces of stones, words and image.

 

Reading widely and deeply, you map the interweaving

Stories of your own and humanity’s spiritual development,

Join a religious order, become a spritual director,

And finally, start a Crone Circle of wise women.

 

Curiously, all these things somehow fit together:

Clearly, you’ve never stopped starting over;

For you, science is leaving behind what no longer works,

A selfsame process of adding on, differentiating, elaborating,

 

Just as you are always the same person,

The passionate, intellectual adventurer, the one

Who keeps transforming herself, like an endless succession

Of butterflies, emerging one from the other.