Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf.”

This quotation aligns with the theme Faith and the Nature of the Divine. The narrator wonders whether life is a series of chances and ordered chaos or if it is designed with intention. The book attempts to answer the question of whether God can be known, and the narrator uses nature to determine the truth.

“The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand.”

The narrator references her childhood practice of hiding pennies along a sidewalk or next to trees for strangers to find. She suggests that the world is filled with opportunities for discovery, making The Power of Observation key. By taking the time to look, one reveals both beauty and brutality.

“What if there are really gleaming, castellated cities hung upside-down over the desert sand? What limpid lakes and cool date palms have our caravans always passed untried?”

The narrator is continuously frustrated by her struggles with observation. When she looks for a muskrat, she sees a fish. When she examines her face in the water, she fails to notice the snails outlining her jaw. Wilderness teems with unobserved, hidden secrets about the nature of God expressed via the natural world.

“Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh flake, feather, bone.”

The narrator frequently becomes wholly absorbed in the natural world and loses her sense of self. As she observes, she gets lost in the present. This, she explains, is consciousness, something that is made up of all living things all at once in a single moment. At such times, she experiences a form of spiritual transformation that mirrors biblical encounters with God and angels.

“Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?”

The narrator is frustrated by what she may be missing when she sits by Tinker Creek. She wonders if there are things that she overlooks because her expectations and understanding of the natural world limit her vision.

“So shadows define the real. If I no longer see shadows as ‘dark marks,’ as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light.”

By the end of the book, the narrator realizes that her experiences with nature’s cruelty and beauty reveal that both are necessary parts of nature and the divine. Shadow and light define one another and contribute to a sense of meaning. For example, in the story of the individuals receiving eye surgery, one of the patients cannot understand the shadows in a painting; to them, the shadows are just one more color blotch on the page, whereas those used to seeing know that shadows help to define shape and form.

“Fish gotta swim and bird gotta fly; insects, it seems, gotta do one horrible thing after another.”

This moment contributes to the motif of via positiva and via negativa. The narrator describes the cruel world of insects as an assault on the idea that God is innately good or kind. If nature reflects God, then God is revealed to be vicious and cold or simply inscrutable.

“Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself.”

The concept of via negativa suggests that it is impossible to ever know God. In the book, shadows represent this idea. The narrator cannot make sense of what she sees at night by the creek because shadows have clouded her vision. Without a holistic picture of nature, she cannot know God.

“It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator—our very self-consciousness—is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures.”

Self-awareness or self-consciousness is the ability to know of one’s own existence and is often described as the defining feature of humankind. While recognizing it as the distinct marker of humanity, the narrator criticizes it for separating humans from the natural world. Unlike other animals, humans can rarely engage fully with the present because they are too aware of their own existence.

“Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.”

Although the narrator recognizes that singularity of vision can uncover certain elements in nature, it can also obscure the ability to notice that which one is not seeking. For example, as she watches for muskrats, she misses the fish that are swimming beneath the surface. The narrator therefore advocates for approaching nature without an agenda and purely observing.

“I left the woods, spreading silence before me in a wave, as though I’d stepped not through the forest, but on it. I left the wood silent, but I myself was stirred and quickened.”

This passage represents another example of the spiritual transformation the narrator experiences while encountering nature. Her description of herself as “stirred” and “quickened” is significant, as both words suggest new life. She will ultimately suggest that both nature and God are in fact life-giving, if only through death.

“'Never lose a holy curiosity,’ Einstein said; and so I lift my microscope down the shelf, spread a drop of duck pond on a glass slide, and try to look spring in the eye.”

The narrator sees observation as a form of spiritual worship. She describes the human condition as being compelled to seek both the wilderness and God. By studying plants and animals, she observes her religion, coming closer to an understanding of God’s nature.

“This is the truth of the pervading intricacy of the world’s detail: the creation is not a study, a roughed-in sketch; it is supremely, meticulously created, created abundantly, extravagantly, and in fine.”

The narrator rejects the idea that the universe is chaos, a series of random chances that produced the world and everything in it. However, this leads her to question the nature of God. If a divine creator designed everything—including the more brutal aspects of nature—then the narrator wonders if this means that God and life are innately cruel.

“The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is the possibility for beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.”

The narrator feels called to seek out the wilderness at Tinker Creek and to contemplate and dissect the beauty of everything around her. She views this desire as an innate need placed there by a divine presence, believing that God has instilled in her an urgent preoccupation with discovery.

“Still, the day had an air of menace. A broken whiskey bottle by the log, the brown tip of a snake’s tail disappearing between two rocks on the hill at my back, the rabbit the dog nearly caught, the rabies I knew was in the country, the bees who kept unaccountably fumbling at my forehead with their furred feet...”

This chapter opens the second half of the book, which centers on the theological concept via negativa. The narrator describes how the landscape surrounding Tinker Creek has shifted as a result of flooding. Everything in this passage speaks to the cruelty and chaos the narrator witnesses and informs her understanding of another side of God—the unknowable side. However, her encounters with brutality still function as a type of spiritual transformation; she is exhilarated and overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of cruelty.

“Everything was so exciting, and so very dark.”

This quotation further expresses the narrator’s religious experience with the darkness and brutality of nature. She is titillated by the ferociousness of nature and (given the work’s theological aspects) perhaps by the enticing nature of sin.

“Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land is a stained altar stone.”

The narrator recognizes death and cruelty as unique to Earth and the animal experience. Other planets rotate through the solar system, untouched by these shadowy elements of God’s nature. Although she rails against God for plunging humanity into a world of dark brutality, she also is grateful for the opportunity to better understand light by its juxtaposition with shadow.

“Just a glimpse, Moses: a cliff in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing. You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers; everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirt too.”

The narrator suggests that observation is necessary—something that humans must do to understand the divine. Knowledge of God does not come through a passive existence. It is only by actively seeking—taking those steps out the door and toward Tinker Creek—that the narrator can uncover truth and meaning.

“Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real.”

This quotation develops the theme of nature’s cruelty and beauty. The narrator suggests that creation and existence are predicated upon both sides of nature; each informs and enhances the other. She alludes to the biblical story of the fall to illustrate this point, suggesting that it was not humanity’s transgression that introduced suffering and death into the world. Rather, these things are essential to the world’s very existence.

“That I fall like Adam is not surprising: I plunge, waft, arc, pour, and dive. The surprise is how good the wind feels on my face as I fall. And the other surprise is that I ever rise at all. I rise when I receive, like grass.”

Just as nature embodies the various dualities expressed throughout the book, humans—as a part of nature—do as well. The narrator dabbles in cruelty, such as when she considers killing a coot. She also dabbles in beauty, continuously overwhelmed by her encounters with loveliness in nature.

“The only way I can reasonably talk about all this is to address you directly and frankly as a fellow survivor. Here we so incontrovertibly are.”

The narrator views life as a type of survival. Cruelty and brutality are inevitable; they inform and define all of nature, as well as the spiritual realm. She keeps a list of animals that survive—a tailless muskrat, an insect that escapes a spider’s web. In this passage, she seems to suggest that she too could be added to that list.

“I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for.”

The waters of separation show how purification and cruelty work together. In this quotation, the narrator shows how humans too possess both qualities. While she is a part of creation and therefore a part of beauty, she also encompasses brutality and ugliness.

“Beauty is real. I would never deny it; the appalling thing is that I forget it. Waste and extravagance go together up and down the banks, all along the intricate fringe of spirit’s free incursions into time.”

The struggle of the narrator to reconcile the cruelty and beauty of nature culminates in her understanding that they are not mutually exclusive. Each informs the other. Although her experiences with brutality cause her to question the existence of beauty, she reminds herself that she has seen beauty, time and again, and been changed by it.