My belief in mind-body dualism ended in a doctor’s office one day in my 20s. After a routine allergy shot, my arm unexpectedly swelled and turned red. They gave me a shot of adrenalin and had me stay till the reaction subsided. While I waited, my mind went into semi-panic, as if my final exams were tomorrow and I hadn’t begun to study. Knowing that the adrenalin gave my feelings a purely physical cause didn’t calm me. Mind and body were inseparable.

“It’s all in your head” implies your idea isn’t real. But if mind and body are one, isn’t your brain where all your ideas exist, I wondered? It’s all in our heads. That’s where experience happens. The physical world outside us is knowable only through what our senses pass on to the brain. And in a world where dogs hear whistles inaudible to us, and most birds can see ultraviolet light we can’t, why assume human perceptions are the best match for what’s out there?

My thoughts evolved further when my optometrist told me recently that glaucoma could advance a lot before I noticed any loss of vision. I asked what I’d see in the blank where the vision is gone. “Oh, your mind just makes it up,” she said. It turns out many gaps in sensory input get filled with the brain’s best guess. Happily, most brains manage amazingly sound guesswork most of the time. “All in your head” is a pretty good place to explore the reality of ourselves and our world.

Image: Allergy shot such as the one that triggered my long-ago reaction. United States Air Force, 2015.
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I believe in magic. How could you not, when flickering sparks dot the evening air and tiny helicopters hover above the beebalm? Of course, firefly and hummingbird behaviors have rational explanations. Their magic lies not in science but in how they defy our intuitions of how the natural world works. Knowing my intuition can err doesn’t stop me from gazing in wonder, often for minutes at a stretch.

Now you see it, now you don’t. A spot glows above the grass for a fraction of a second, then another across the way. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it. John Ruskin writes of an evening in Italy, “[T]he fireflies among the scented thickets shone fitfully in the still undarkened air. How they shone! moving like fine-broken starlight through the purple leaves.” Irish poet Frank Ormsby queries “their quick flare of promise and disappointment.” Might they be saying “That any antic spark cruising the void might titillate creation?”
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Hummingbirds share that fleeting quality Emily Dickinson calls evanescence. For every hummingbird I can watch approach or leave a flower, another seems to materialize out of the blue, hover at the bloom, and vanish. Robert Frost delights in the unexpected: “And make us happy in the darting bird / That suddenly above the bees is heard, / The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, / And off a blossom in mid air stands still.” Joy, surprise, amazement. Magic.

Images: (left) Fireflies in the forest near Nuremberg, Germany, exposure time 30 sec.; (right) Female ruby-throated hummingbird sipping nectar from scarlet beebalm, photographer Joe Schneid, Louisville, Kentucky.

Bittersweet, isn’t it, how summer has barely begun before daylight starts to recede? In truth, unlike winter, I scarcely notice the changing hour of sunrise or sunset. My memories of childhood summers are of one long, undifferentiated season of glorious sunshine outdoors. Logic says I had to be aware of rainy days and time indoors, but the gradual darkening from June through August escaped my attention.

As an older adult, I watch sub-seasonal changes more closely. New perennials constantly come into bloom; in one friend’s words, it’s like Christmas every day. Flying insects bite in June. Ragweed pollen triggers allergies in August. My childhood memories associate sneezes more with going back to school in the fall.

​Sub-seasonal changes in fauna and flora likely involve light as well as moisture, temperature, and who knows what else. Still, shorter days are among the shifts I notice least. That’s not a complaint. There’s a reason the winter solstice gets more attention than the summer one. As one who prefers light over darkness, in winter I need every reminder of hope that comes with the return of the sun. In summer, the future can wait. I’ll relish all the joy that’s on offer right now. 

Have you ever tried to justify your taste to others who challenge it? To argue the strengths of a particular movie or restaurant to someone who asks, “Why would you want to see that?” “How could you ever eat there?” Samantha Irby’s “I Like It!” in her essay collection Quietly Hostile (Random House, 2023) rings true to my experience. I'd get defensive when friends told me they liked every kind of music except country, a genre I enjoyed. I'd argue why I drove a novel route instead of the usual, faster one.

Unless you’re an acquisitions editor or a landscape architect looking at practical consequences, it isn’t worth the tension. No need to explain or make excuses. No need to prove your sophistication. Irby says “I like it!” is enough, complete with exclamation point.

Walking an unfamiliar business district with a friend, hungry for our first meal of the day, I pointed to the International House of Pancakes across the street. My companion scowled and said, “Let’s keep looking.” Suspecting unfounded prejudice, I asked, “When did you last eat at an IHOP?” The answer: Not for years.

I now regret my response. Feeling put down for my breakfast preference, I unconsciously tried to put my friend on the defensive in return. We could have agreed on a restaurant without debating our difference in tastes. “I don’t like it” is just as valid as “I like it.”

Image: Looking west down Route 66, Williams, Arizona. Photo by Steven C. Price, 2015.

Sometime around fifth grade, I decided Nazis and Communists weren’t opposites. They were more like the tips of a horseshoe, curving around to arrive closer together than either was to the middle. I didn’t yet know the word authoritarian, but I understood both Nazi and Communist systems were the opposite of freedom.

I had a pretty secure childhood. My family was intact. My dad had a job. I brought milk money to school without having to wait for payday. We didn’t hold air raid drills to stir fears of nuclear war. Who would bother to bomb West Virginia?

It’s easy to value freedom when your world feels safe. It’s harder when your expectations wither and you lose agency or control. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . . The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” (W B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” 1919). That happened amid the horrors of World War I. It happened in the Great Depression. It happens when Americans lose trust in the possibility of a better life than their parents, the hope of ever getting out of debt, or the notion that their sacrifices are for something worth sacrificing for.

When freedom feels like anarchy or victimhood, many prefer tough, charismatic leaders who promise to set the world in order. How do we build trust in ways that sustain democracy instead of undermining it? I don’t know the full answer. I suspect it begins with creating conditions in which most people feel both free and secure, with a sense of agency and hope.
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Images: (left) The Haymarket Riot, in Harper’s Weekly, May 15, 1886. (right) Winter Olympic Games, photograph by Heinrich Hoffmahn, Feb. 6, 1936. German Federal Archives.