Then I have an idea. I am the last one in line, the caboose to this convoy. I roll the tissue into my palm, tight and invisible, and casually remove my hand from my pocket and lower it to my side, still balled up. Like a practiced sneak, I slowly unfurl my fingers one by one. The tissue falls, my step quickens. In a moment I am a few feet beyond it—and no one has seen. I let out my breath.

This isn’t the earliest memory I have, but it’s one of the few that has a distinct narrative—it makes me laugh to consider how terrified I was of doing anything even remotely against the rules, or that called attention to myself—and how devious I was willing to be in the service of that anonymity. It tells me I have not, perhaps, changed all that much.

There are other things I remember: eating porridge with slices of boiled chicken at my upstairs neighbor’s house, singing “You Are My Sunshine” in rounds in the car, burning the skin of my knees on the scratchy red carpet that only existed in one room of my family’s old apartment, getting Barbie dolls out from under the bed. But in general, the impressions I have of my early childhood are few, vague, and fugitive. When I can see them at all they are like the patterns on the insides of your eyelids—try to focus on them, and they change.

It’s not uncommon for a few startlingly clear visions to persist from a very young age. When I ask, my friend Regina says she can feel herself lying on her brother’s warm, comforting back, the two of them in a cot surrounded by the noise of strange children at a daycare center; she was 18 months old. Yvette, not much older than that when she was in the hospital for heart surgery, has on her tongue the taste of the popsicle a nurse thought to give her: Grape. But for the most part, when it comes to early memories we are all, relatively speaking, paupers caressing a small handful of coins.

You might imagine that young minds haven’t yet developed the neurological capacity—the physical equipment, so to speak—to store memories about experiences over time. Brain structures known to be vital for processing episodic memory, after all, such as the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, do not develop fully for years.

Sensible as this theory seems, it’s hard to pit it against the facts. Six month-old babies can remember previously formed associations, like the fact that if they kick their leg just so, a pretty mobile that some strange scientific hand has tied to their ankle will twist in the air above over and over, like a bird, all color and light. And pain, of course, just as well as pleasure, makes its way into the brain. When my nephew was barely a year and a half old he crashed his head against a glass table. For days, my sister says, he’d return to the same spot and show her how it had happened, pantomiming his bump, face crumpling into a facsimile of the wail he’d wailed when it first happened. It is almost as if—not really, I know, but as if—he had some intuition that the moment would not last long, and thought to place it with someone who could hold it after he himself had forgotten.

Amazingly, scientists have been able to show that the ability to form complex episodic memories starts literally in the womb; we know this thanks to Dr. Seuss and two curious researchers. In 1986, A.J. De Casper and M. Spence asked pregnant women to read aloud one of three similar excerpts from The Cat in the Hat every day, several times a day, for six weeks before they gave birth. Three days after each baby was born, an ingenious set up allowed them to “choose” which of the three short passages they wanted to hear by varying the rate at which they suckled on a teat. By significant margins, the tiny infants showed they remembered and preferred the familiar reading to the ones they had never heard before. (A control group of unread-to babies had no particular feelings on the subject.)

In other words, children are not, by any means, sieves through which experiences flow like water without ever being caught. Yet the empirical evidence that most of us hold fewer memories from the earliest years of our lives than from later ones is impossible to ignore. If people are asked to describe as many childhood memories as they can, almost none of the items they recall will have occurred before their third birthday; after that, the number of memories they cite soars markedly. A statistical analysis of memories plotted against age finds that the scarcity of early recollections is even greater than you would expect after taking into consideration the fact that the older a memory is, the more likely it is to have decayed.

Caroline Miles, questioning a hundred college-aged women in 1893, found that the average age from which a first recollection came was 3.04 years; no subject of hers cited an event, impression, or sensation dating from when they were younger than 2.6 years. Since then, over a century of studies of early childhood memories have arrived at conspicuously similar figures, with some small, but interesting variations across culture and gender: Women typically remember slightly more childhood details than men, Americans typically reach slightly further back than do Chinese.

Psychologists have a name for this lacuna in our lives, this band of time at the end of which, it seems, we each line up to drink deeply from Lethe’s stream and give up most of what we once knew. This first forgetting. Depending on who you ask, it is called in the literature either “infantile amnesia” or “childhood amnesia,” names which have something of the absurdly overblown—they make us all sound like so many desperate soap opera characters bumbling about in a world full of strangers, our whole past lives erased at a single stroke.

And yet there is, truly, a note of tragedy about this very ordinary amnesia. We have reason to believe that the sensations we have as infants and very young children are exquisitely intense, full of vivid sounds, shapes, smells, images, and ideas that fly across our consciousness from every corner. Because we are less cognizant of established patterns, less able quickly to file away each impression into a neat category as soon as it arrives, we are (in the way so many of us strive to be in our adult lives) flooded with excitement and adventure—hyper-aware of the bright, sweet world in which we live.

But look at us now. Look at me. In the face of all that wondrous experience I imagine to have once coursed through my brain like rivers of fire, here I am today: working eagerly at the meager store of memories I have from my childhood as if they were a few small pieces of tissue in my pocket, wearing thinner and thinner with each rub.

Why?

As with so many questions about memory and experience, no one really knows for sure. No one, any longer, believes Freud was right about the mind’s need to quell the “trauma” of psychosexual development by repressing memories associated with growing up, as if the entire adult human race were a limping legion of soldiers who had survived a war, each tender from the wounds of childhood itself.

Instead, most current theories seem in one sense or another to treat the fierce, beautiful memories from this period of our lives like lost treasure, buried under the ground somewhere and we without a map.

Maybe, some have argued, it takes a while for the brain to develop the ability to properly label individual memories with information about the way in which they arose, so that while we may on some deep level remember an experience itself, we are unable to access it because we no longer remember its source. If, for instance, you had not yet developed a sense of self, to what anchor could you safely attach your memories of things that happened to you? I like this notion. I think of balloons that ought to be tethered to a pole, to a tree branch, to a chubby wrist, coming free of their loose knots. Once they had flown high, ranged far away, could you bring them home again?

Or maybe, others say, the tens of billions of synaptic connections we lose as we age into adulthood prevent us from retrieving the recollections we formed early on, because many of the complex strings of firings that once led our minds from here to there have now been broken somewhere along the line. I like this notion, too. I think of a spider’s web that someone has walked through, intricate and gauzy. All unknowing, they shake their heads free of the fine threads as they step away, and leave this corner fragmented from that. I think of a house with ten thousand rooms and a thousand locked doors.

And maybe, still others guess—the ones, I imagine, who love words as much as I do— before we can use language to describe an event, even if only in our minds, memories live in silence. Wanting names, they persist—but cannot be called. I love this notion best of all. It feels less lonely than the others.

I think of a mind full of old friends, waiting for me to remember who they are.

At eleven I wanted everything under control. I was up when the sun was a murmur, stomach turning at the prospect of breakfast so early. My hair was a thick fountain I had to subdue into a ponytail neat enough for school and my desire to do things exactly right (a desire since mostly lost). I worked and reworked it, each time finding I’d sat my rubber band too far to the left or the right, or that threads of too-short hair were escaping from its noose, or that where I thought I had brushed my scalp into perfect smoothness there was still a small hillock of hair, invisible but to my own questing fingers. My sandwich sat uneaten.

Later I was a teenager, and let my hair down, and—bliss—it was a pair of doors I could shut against the world. Teachers nattered at it, instead of me. (Also, though I did not realize it then, I’d grown a set of blinders. Nothing could be seen beyond the edges of my hair, but for several years there was plenty to occupy me between their curtains: the curve of a friend’s back as she walked away, the crazy softness of a boy’s lip, my gigantic fear of being unloved.)

I began to imagine it would one day grow so long it would descend into the ground like roots, fixing me where I was. Perhaps that’s why it all came off in one dramatic gesture. How many other things were tangled in it! I looked down when it was done and saw them all snipped in half. Slick heat and sweat. The idea of being beautiful. The memory of dancing to “Copa Cabana” some school-day afternoon, laughing through my fingers. Some of them I’d have wanted to keep, if I’d known that’s where they’d been.

The year I turned 21 I was living in Jerusalem with an English boy, and it had been two years or more since I’d sat in a revolving chair, leaning my head back for a cut like a patient ready for surgery.

I was very happy then. As for my hair, it was happy, too. It wriggled with happiness; I could feel it sometimes when we sat on the bus together and everyone else leaned a little towards the speakers, listening to the hourly news. My hair leaned towards the English boy. It waved down my back like the shining tide of a gentle sea. At night we arranged ourselves, he and I, like two bookends tucked into each other. That was so he could brush my hair a hundred times, giving it all the attention of a tailor smoothing out a magnificent piece of fabric that had not yet received its first cut. When we parted the boy took some with him; for all I know he has it still.

Lately I have been cutting my own hair, chopping at it like a woodman who doesn’t care how rough are the edges of the stumps he leaves behind. I am all business. What is gone is gone.

Natalie Angier (I do adore her; she inspired my only fan letter to the New York Times to date) has written that the skin is the organ with the biggest mouth. She says it trumpets our emotions with its goosebumps and blushes, reveals our weaknesses with its scars and scrapes, and is, no matter how much we may wish it to be otherwise, the well-judged cover for a book no one, really, will ever read from first to last page.

She’s right, of course: skin is a loudmouth. But if you ask me, what hair lacks in volume it makes up for in storytelling style. It may be bloodless—at least by the time its questing fibers are pushed up from beneath the scalp—but it has a heartbeat. How else to explain the fact that it can keep time (let’s see skin do that)?

Don’t believe me? Try this. Take a few long strands of hair from a brand new mother, all relief and tears, her sweet infant barely out of its packaging. Get them right from the scalp, and don’t worry; she’ll barely notice you. Take more from a woman whose child is now three-months known, her eyes bleary from 90 interrupted nights. Another from a six-month mother, practically a veteran of cradling and lullabies and midnight messes, and still more from the head of one just beginning to hear her nine-month-old babble like a brook.

All set? Right. Now. Check the very highest tip of the hair from the newest mother, the flickery spot where it emerged from its follicle, for cortisol. That’s a substance that’s a marker for stress (people call it the fight-or-flight hormone). When a woman becomes pregnant she is flooded with cortisol. It soothes her response to pain, gives her more energy, and—some evidence suggests—makes her more attentive to danger. Look at the nib of that hair, and you’ll find cortisol in spades right there, just at the point of her baby’s birth. Now move three centimeters along the hair, and test again. Less cortisol. Another three centimeters, and test again. Still less, in an utterly predictable monotonic progression.

Do the same thing with the hair from the other women, and you’ll find the level of cortisol decreasing from high to low, step-wise along the hair, in just the same way—except now the highest level won’t be found at the tip. It’ll be three centimeters along with the mothers of three-month-olds. Six centimeters along with the mothers of six-month-olds. And so on.

Line them all up against each other, matching hormone levels as you go, and what you get, in effect, is an astonishingly accurate calendar of pregnancy’s effect on cortisol production in a woman’s body. Here is where it all began, two cells meeting, merging, making plans for the future. Here they’ve grown into a little lemon, here there are hands that wave through amniotic fluid as if swimming. Here everything is ready at last, racing like a freight train towards that long-awaited emergence.

All this happens, of course, because a growing hair takes on all manner of free-floating biochemical stowaways in the blood it absorbs from its follicle, each of which is permanently incorporated into its cellular structure at that precise point. If someone were trying to poison you with lead, your hair would know. If you’d been good and given up all your vices, your hair would speak your virtue. And though it has no life of its own, hair still breathes the air you breathe, drinks the water you drink. It remembers where you live.

It’s all there—the inner ebb and flow of anxiety and love, the things you’ve brought into yourself, the places you’ve traveled—all documented in a curl. It doesn’t go away, either. Hair can keep a secret for more than a thousand years, it seems. And knowing that, I am a little rueful over the decades of ink I’ve spilled below my chair. Whole novels’ worth, perhaps. The longer the strand, the deeper the communiqué?

I’m growing it out now, you know. I’m waiting to see what my blood writes in it.

But far more wonderful, what I knew about the comparatively slim volume revealed its position within that most favored of literary genres: the infinite book. That “thousand and one!” How I craved its everlasting promise of still one more night after you thought the final one had come.

One other thing gave the Thousand and One Nights limitless mystery, and that was the fact that it held stories within stories within stories. Scheherazade would begin to tell a tale, and all of a sudden its narrator would begin to tell his own tale, and before you knew it its narrator was holding forth on yet another narrative, and so on and so forth until your head spun with delicious confusion. No matter where you looked, it seemed, there was a tiny reflection of the book as a whole, which in turn contained its own reflection, which contained…and in turn…and in turn… The book of Nights was made of endless versions of itself, writ small (er and smaller and smaller).

As in the Nights, so in Nature. Self-similarity is everywhere. Each stretch of the British coastline, fractal-father Mandelbrot tells us, curves and jags and undulates in such a way as to produce a remarkably faithful scale model (not perfect, but close) of the coastline as a whole, no matter how many times you carve it up into smaller and smaller pieces. Always you will find that each individual part contains within itself a rough unabridged copy of the total sum.

So again with the leaves of a fern, whose fronds divide into fronds that divide into fronds, and with the branching bronchial tubes of the lungs, which fork and fork and fork once more. Raise your head to the skies and there too the part reflects the whole. Galaxies clump into small groups, like little knots of gossiping schoolchildren; those clumps form larger clusters, and those clusters even larger throngs.

(What is it for, all this huddling? Is it a lonely thing, being a galaxy? I can’t imagine it could be, since you yourself are made up of clustered clustered clusters of stars…)

And what does all this have to do with New Year’s Day, my dear dears? Why, only this: When I woke up this morning I resolved to make my own self-similarity. This first day, I decided—itself just one small part of the long annum stretching out before me in all its promise and disappointment—should be a scale model, crafted as best I can, of what I want the year to be like.

Therefore, this is what today contained:

Waking to sunlight through curtains and a cat on my belly.

Cooking, with Ross and for a friend. Eating what I had made. Laughing.

Walking, face tingling in the January (!) cold. Looking. Breathing. Hugging Ross.

Making what I know how to make.

Sitting, just sitting, while music plays. Reading with a cup of coffee by my side.

Finally, perhaps most importantly of all, writing this for both you and myself, with a calm heart and nothing to prove.

Welcome to a new decade, readers-mine. I’m enjoying it so far. I’m imagining, at least for one day, that I know what the future holds. It holds a thousand and one New Year’s Days.

In the meantime, I have a guest arriving in about an hour and a half and there are onions to caramelize and limes to slice and coffee to brew. I’m going to leave you with something I published today for Inkling that I particularly like.

P.S. I’ve decided. This place is going to get a lot less formal.

I strove to be still because movements, in those moments, were traitors. Fear could speak its name in the shudder of a shoulder and there was no step but a misstep. So I paused, glassy as a frozen pond.

My silence here lately has had that same root, I think. It’s been a long, strange year. I’ve unmoored myself, once again, from a career that didn’t satisfy me. And once again I am afraid of defeat. I’ve been trying, I’ll admit, to stop time with hushed inaction. Later, I tell myself, I will speak. Later begin to move. Now, for now, let me be a statue who never leaves her spot. Better that than a human being, capable of tripping. Capable of falling.

But here is the truth; I’m not, you know. Not glassy, or frozen, or still. Not for a second, no matter how paralyzed I think I am. I haven’t a choice about it. Nothing can stop me from swaying to keep my balance.

It’s clear, I suppose, that movement requires reams of complex coordination. I lift my hand to turn the page of the book I’m reading (One Hundred Years of Solitude, for the third and best time in the past dozen years), and to do so I must regulate, consciously or not, the movement of the joints at my shoulder, elbow, wrist, thumb, and forefinger—each of which is capable of turning and bending independently in up to three dimensions. That, in turn, requires controlling the contraction of nearly thirty different muscles, including the six sinewey carpal muscles that bind the wrist and let it roll over in a small half-moon once my fingers have grasped their insubstantial target. Peer in, and these muscles themselves have constituents whose movements must harmonize: fibers threaded together in bundles, each individual bundle squeezing or easing at the bidding of a single nerve.

My many parts synchronize in a beautiful clockwork, all so the sentence that begins somberly on page 70 can end on page 71 with a faint smile: “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one…sees in vegetarians.”

But in stillness, surely, there is rest. As I stand without moving, not even shifting from foot to foot, surely the threads out of which my muscles are woven are unruffled. I want this to be true so badly. Yes, breath continues, and heartbeat. Fluid moves across membranes and always there is the minute trundling of molecular motors carrying their endless loads across my cells. But look, I tell myself, these are only tremors within, rumblings beneath the earth. At least the earth itself remains stoic. My body, terra firma. So do I keep myself safe. In my immobility I can be a soft black hat on a table, waiting for the flourish of handkerchiefs that will prove the show was worth coming for.

Not so. Standing itself is parlous, and never as steady as it looks. Consider how heavy is the human head upon its kinky spine, how large the torso on its spindly legs, and yet how thick those legs compared to the stiff ankles, the tiny feet, upon which we place at last the entire burden of ourselves. We are not built, like lions, on four muscled legs, the pillars of an ancient church. Like inverted pendulums, we are secured to the ground, but travel up through our torsos and to our crowns and what you find is oscillation.

This is what the physiologists say—and they should know, because they watch: No one is ever truly standing still.

We do not ripple as do pliant blades of grass, breathed on by the wind. Instead, we fight to maintain verticality through a near-constant series of tiny displacements and corrections activated within the musculoskeletal system. Postural sway is what they call it. A gentle phrase, and one that captures both the strictness of our ideal (Watch your posture, young lady!) and the impossibility of adhering to it. Motionless we are not.

Here, then, is what moves us. It starts with diminutive shifts in the intensity and positioning of the points of pressure where our soles meet the ground. All unconscious, we map and remap the subtle forces with which we push back against the earth. As we do so, the imaginary reference point we use to gauge our balance (somewhere in between our feet) becomes a constantly moving target. It wanders.

“Rambling,” this is called affectionately in some scientific literature, as if the center of each human being’s personal universe is defined by the fact that it likes to take long walks in the outback.

So. We have a point of reference that keeps us upright, and it moves. But it isn’t unwatched. The current position of this center of pressure is instantly communicated by nerve signals traveling up the brain stem and into the neural system that controls balance. In response, nerves fire in an imperceptible ballet. They gently squeeze and relax those braided threads that make up the muscles in our calves, abdomen, back, thorax. The whole delicate orchestration causes equally diminutive shifts—”trembling,” they call this—in the position of our center of gravity.

Trembling follows rambling, and so we stand. How frail those words make us sound. Like needles skipping across a sheet of paper, following a skittering heart.

Not so long ago, apparently, researchers regarded these stray wobbles as nothing but noise, meaningless bits of information generated by a flawed neural system that was not built well enough to give absolutely correct instructions. If the brain could direct the body to be perfectly still around a fixed central point, the thinking went, it would be. What can we say? It can’t. C’est la vie.

If you had told me this, that day on the train, I’d have nodded. It would have been of a piece with my mood then. I’d launched myself into the air, expecting to fly, and fallen terribly. To learn that even my penitent stillness was deficient would have been no surprise.

But scientists, unlike saturnine ex-teachers, do not like the idea that things are just so because they are imperfect. Imperfection is not very interesting. So they continue to wonder about this sway. They draw graphs of it, delightful manic scribbles like ants circling about a drop of syrup, and see that though the movements we make as we shift and sway are variable, they vary within strict limits. No ant strays too far from the sugar.

Scientists also try to poke at the problem, making us close our eyes and seeing if our spontaneous quiverings change. And look, look here. They do. The intensity of postural sway increases significantly with eyes shut. But the tiny muscle movements we make don’t get more haphazard, as they might if the brain were just making more mistakes. The ants are wandering a little further away, but they’re still finding that sweet center.

(Are the ants working for you? They are for me, but I’ve been thinking about this all evening, worrying away at the idea of it. I might be an ant myself. If not, here’s what might be clearer.)

The reason you sway more when you close your eyes, scientists think, is not that you become unsteady, in danger of losing your balance. It’s that you’re working harder to keep the balance you have. With each tiny shift in those pressure points in the soles of your feet, each minute muscular movement in your legs or back, this theory holds, your brain is tracking information about your position in the world. In a way, the sway is a way to test the limits of stability.

If I do this, am I still standing? What about this? Or this? The same incessant experiment takes place whether your eyes are open or not—the brain and body are just more enthusiastic about their probings when one perceptual channel is closed off.

What I am saying is this: Maybe I have to stand up and sway to stay in balance. I’m a little less funereal now than I was those few years ago, a little more willing to welcome uncertainty. Maybe stillness itself is the root of the fall. And maybe, every instant in which I stray away from the perfect center I seek shall be followed by a move back towards it. I’m by no means sure of that. But I do like the idea of experimenting with the limits of stability. And I think I’ll be doing a little more of it right here from now on.

*******

Carrying a Ladder

We are always
really carrying
a ladder, but it’s
invisible. We
only know
something’s
the matter:
something precious
crashes; easy doors
prove impassable.
Or, in the body,
there’s too much
swing or off-
center gravity.
And, in the mind,
a drunken capacity,
access to out-of-range
apples. As though
one had a way to climb
out of the damage
and apology.

—Kay Ryan

And so, one creature—sometimes a duck, sometimes a turtle, sometimes a beaver or our old trickster friend coyote—was sent by the others to dive deep, deep, deep below the dark waves to bring up some earth with which to build a world. But the task was too perilous, and the first emissary perished before it could swim far enough down, or else returned to the surface of the water empty-handed and half-dead from exhaustion and breathlessness. It had to go again, or let another go in its stead. This went on, the stories say, for some long while, and discouragement fell upon the creatures of the universe. But then a piece of luck came along. After the third or fourth or fifth grueling dive, a few nearly invisible grains of sand were finally discovered tucked beneath the nails of the one who was the last to descend—the one who without even noticing had scraped against the bottom of the ocean floor.

From these specks—this grist—the whole world was formed.

Ross can’t stand sand, for exactly the reason that it is able to play such an important role in these mythic landscapes. Sand clings to you, he complains, embeds itself in crevices, lodges between nails and skin. Light enough to travel, it blows into your hair; heavy enough to settle, it accumulates inside shoes. In general, Ross tolerates sand for the sake of the sea. Last weekend, it was the promise of open skies and a roaring fire that allowed him to rise above this deeply rooted prejudice. We hopped in a rental car, tucked two little-used sleeping bags in its trunk, and drove some 75 miles east and north along the smooth curve of the great Lake Michigan to reach the sandy slopes of Warren Dunes State Park in Sawyer, Michigan.

Michigan is piled high with sand dunes that have formed along the shores of the lake: in all, over 275,000 acres, or nearly one percent of the total land area of the state, is covered in the grassy up and down terrain of dune formations. We drove all that way so that we could go camping in the shadow of several of those dunes. And while we were there, scrambling step by slippery step up a sand dune as steep as a cliff and digging our toes into the cool, crumbling sand of the beach (or at least my toes; Ross’s stayed safe inside his socks), I realized that not only did I not know how a sand dune forms, or what brings a beach into being—I barely understood the source of sand itself. What was it made of? What forces created it, and how far had it traveled, if at all, to come here? I had no knowledge, in any deep way, of the nature of what I was standing on. In case this describes you as surely as it did me last Saturday, I thought I’d share with you the things I’ve gathered since.

This is how it goes. It turns out that the definition of sand is, like the substance itself, a little fluid. The American Heritage Dictionary claims sand consists of “small, loose grains of worn or disintegrated rock.” But how small is small? Wonderfully, there is an official sedimentologist-approved range, which is precisely 0.0625 to 2.0 millimeters in diameter. It may not sound like it, but that allows for a tremendous variety of amplitudes. Sand is not composed of a uniformity of pretty, machined beads, each identical to the next: it is pinprick small; splinter-small; tiny shard of broken shotglass-small; small as a cumin seed; small as the ovary in a female Sora found in the fall. It occurs to me that a handful of sand is, in this one odd way, like the sixth grade classes I once taught, tumbling between childhood and adolescence: some sweet faces so tiny you could still cup their whole cheek in one palm, some stretching so tall they were almost all the way out of their skins.

Now, what about this “disintegrated rock”? It’s true that most of the sand upon the earth comes from igneous rocks. These are formed when red-hot magma beneath the earth’s surface collects and hardens in small pockets underground, or when volcanic eruptions exhale molten lava that later cools. You can remember this, as I will from now on, by thinking of the word “ignite,” which has the same Latin root meaning “fiery.” Glaciers can mash these rocks down to crumbs, as a stale loaf of bread might fall to fragments beneath the heel of your hand. Even if this doesn’t happen, the rocks, exposed to the whipping, grinding, rubbing, licking touch of wind and rain—geology as foreplay—are bound to erode over time. Bits break off, and are blown or washed by the same wind and rain into rivers; the rivers, in turn, carry them to a sea or to a lake, polishing them into rounder and rounder grains as they go.

But there are other ways in which sand can be formed, other materials out of which it can be made. On tropical beaches, vast stretches of sand are formed out of the calcium carbonate of crumbling skeletons and shells once belonging to marine life like snails, crabs, coral, and the beautiful, surreal unicellular organisms called Foraminifera that litter the ocean floor. This is sand as the fine, white ash of death. Sand can form slowly, gently, when minerals formerly dissolved in seawater lay themselves down in a crusty powder on the shore; it can burst forth in an intemperate rainfall of new granules when a falling meteorite violently liquefies the rock where it touches down on the earth.

Even ordinary sand, “worn or disintegrated rock” sand, is full of multiplicity, pulsing with elemental force. Some grains, made of iron, are dark and heavy, like small black jewels; they hunger for each other and are drawn to magnets. Most, made of quartz, are light and bright, like bits of glass. If you could run an electric current through them, their piezoelectric property would cause them to expand and contract like minute beating hearts in perfect rhythm; you could tell time by them. We do tell time by them. To let a palmful of sand run through your fingers—some grains of which, perhaps, are billions of years old—is to hear all the stories of the ancient earth, if you only knew how to listen.

Then there is the way sand grows into beaches, the way such tiny things—maybe as tiny as 0.0625mm! But for sure no bigger than 2.0mm!—build whole vistas that stretch for miles, and the fact that this happens grain by grain. Waves deposit sand particles incrementally on the edge of the shore as they break. Waves steal a little sand back into the water, too, as they retreat—but unless they are very big waves indeed, they draw away less than they bring, because their gentle downward flow is weaker than their rushing upward push.

I like knowing this about waves; their actions seem both ambitious and tentative. I think about the water pushing sand forward, pulling back, pushing forward, pulling back, and it reminds me that when you are trying to establish something new, it is okay if you take many steps along the way that seem to move you backward. It is part of the rhythm of creation to do so. And in this way, little by little, a beach is built like the one we stood on last Saturday. If ever there was a testament to the power of small individual acts to accomplish great things, it is not the acorn growing into a vast tree; it is sand, forming the universe out of specks.

So much for beaches, formed by waves; as for dunes, like the bluff I clambered up, so vertiginous it took my breath away and left me marveling and dizzy, their story is of the wind. Once sand that has gathered on the shore has dried enough to blow about, a steady breeze moving in from the water shifts some of it further inland. It doesn’t take much force. A gentle zephyr of 9 or 10 miles per hour will do it—just enough to move the leaves in the trees or blow a twig lightly across the ground. The wind, after all, isn’t trying to move the whole dune into place at once. Grain by grain. That’s how the world is built.

Breathed on by a breeze, sand moves in a funny sort of hopping dance called saltation, from the Latin saltus: “leap.” (Think of somersault!) The force of the wind gives each grain enough momentum to jump, in a shallow parabola, a little distance upwards and along; as one grain does so, it loosens other grains, which themselves bounce into the air, and so on and so on and so on.

Eventually, saltating sand grains (I had to whisper that phrase aloud to myself just then; it was as lovely on the tongue as I imagined it would be) falling one upon the other form enough of a habitat for hardy beach grasses like reed and marram to grow in. It is these roots, at last, that stop the migrating sand. Without the roots, it would keep hopping forever, wild as sown oats. But moored by vegetation, the sand stops. It settles. It grows higher. Higher. Higher. And there it is, a dune.

I love that. Something so stately, built out of a million grains of skipping, prancing, frolicking sand, given legs by the wind.

Of course, a dune is no permanent thing. It reacts to its surroundings, changes its shape from moment to moment with the shifting wind and the heavy steps of those who walk upon it.

I thought last Saturday of the dunes of rose and olive and ultramarine sand in Goab, the Desert of Colors. Goab is a place from my childhood. It is formed, in Michael Ende’s extraordinary novel The Neverending Story, out of the crumbling leaves and flowers of a fabulous Night Forest that dissolves into dust with the sunrise. The sands of Goab are new every morning, and yet their essence remains so much the same that the mighty lion Grogaman can find among Goab’s shifting dunes the very place where he stood the day before. Gazing down at my footsteps on the dunes, I wished to be Grogaman. I wished to know the sand that well. It is, I think, worth knowing.

In the end we spent only a single day and night on the Michigan dunes, cradled in the courting cries of crickets and frogs, the laughter of friends, and the sputter and crack of our own warm fire. I wanted it to go on forever, to keep going to sleep beneath all that old light—the kind I can’t see here in the glittering nighttime of the big city.

But there is this, and it is no small thing: Sand clings. It accumulates. It travels. It leaps into any space large enough (small enough) to hold it. So when I did get home, this is what I did. I tipped as many tiny crystals out of my sneakers as would have been required to build a hundred or more new worlds. I’m saving them, for now. You never know when you’ll need that kind of seed.

If you have never had the pleasure of visiting the Fern Room, the best way I can think of to describe it is to tell you that it is a place where all the colors of the spectrum seem to have been suddenly replaced by a hundred thousand different shades of green. The light that outside was so harsh and dazzling is now filtered through shady fronds of emerald, jade, and olive, and instead of walls and corridors the stout trunks of cycads and the lacy leaflets of ancient ferns divide the room into secret passages and broad arcades. At every turn you begin to expect a horned triceratops or armored ankylosaurus to push through the vegetation, shaking its head and crying, What—is it you? For shame, for shame! You’re sixty million years early!

I came for the cycads, having just read of the endlessly charming Oliver Sacks’ journey to a remote Pacific Island in order to run his hands along their stiff, glossy, blade-like leaves, beguiling but toxic suspects in his search for the source of a strange disease of the mind. But it was the ferns that captured me. I liked their delicately forked fronds, each one divided into innumerable leaflets, called pinnae, that spread outwards like gentle fingers touching the air. Some curled this way and that, and when they did I could see that they were studded with neat lines of rough buttons on the underside. The buttons were called sori, I learned later, and each little nub of a sora held clusters of sporangia, themselves tiny round bubbles holding even tinier spores—these last, as fine as dust, the powder of the next generation.

In the time of Shakespeare, people didn’t know about spores. They thought it obvious that ferns, like all other sensible plants, propagated themselves through seeds, which are eminently practical devices that contain not only the embryonic beginnings of a new plant, but food for the road as well, and have smooth, smart coats to protect them from the elements. (Spores, which are single-celled motes almost too small to see, seem impoverished by comparison.)

But since, five hundred years ago, not a soul had yet recognized the brown patches on the undersides of fern leaves as containing reproductive particles, it began to be believed that the so-called seeds of ferns were cryptic, secret things, not simply well hidden but, in fact, invisible. And like spores that fly far from the fronds where they were first exhaled, that idea traveled and grew. Eventually, wondering herbalists transformed it into the astonishing claim that if you could, somehow, collect the elusive fern seed (say at the moody hour of midnight on Midsummer Night’s Eve) and clutch it in your hand, you yourself would be veiled from the prying eyes of others. In the words of a thief from Henry IV, about to embark on an ambitious robbery, we steal as in a castle, cock-sure; we have the receipt of fern seed—we walk invisible.

It is a very pretty notion indeed, but if I were to steal an essential quality from a fern it would not be invisibility, but persistence.

It isn’t easy to contemplate the earth in its wildest, most wonderful days of youth, but when we do picture it, ferns are the plants we see in our mind’s eyes, blanketing the new world in a riot of green fronds and settling their wispy roots into a rich black soil. The very oldest of ferns are almost impossibly ancient, at least from the perspective of complex living things, some 345 million years old; that makes them older than the dinosaurs, older than flowering plants, and far older than any fuzzy bee that they might otherwise have relied upon to pollinate them. They were giants, then, too, snaking up to the height of ten-story buildings. After the dinosaurs dwindled and died, and almost every other form of life went with them, ferns returned first of all to make the earth verdant again. They grew close together, like brothers, and shielded the soil, and gave other green things the time they needed to revive.

Not only old, ferns, not only huge, not only tenacious, but also numerous: their tally during the Carboniferous period, when they first appeared, was so great that when they died, their remains helped to form vast coal beds all across the earth, hundreds of miles wide and hundreds of feet deep. For hundreds of years we have mined the bodies of ferns to fuel our industry, build our cities, and sustain the needs and desires of our daily lives, and still we have not managed to exhaust their reserves.

What is perhaps even more astonishing is that throughout all these long eons, many ferns have continued to unfurl, generation after generation, into the very same forms they have always had, altering very little about their strange, self-sufficient design. Soft brushes wielded by eager paleontologists, for instance, have gently pushed the dirt from two hundred million year-old fossils of Osmunda clatoniana. Today, the same fern continues to put forth its long, fuzzy stalks in rich woods from Newfoundland to Manitoba, South Carolina to Arkansas, and every point in between.

Its common name may be the “Interrupted Fern,” because tiny brown leaflets, fertile with hundreds of thousands of spores, break up the smooth green lines of its fronds—but its lengthy existence on this earth has been anything but. The same answers that made sense to it two hundred million years ago still make sense now: it has the same leaflet shapes, the same reproductive mechanisms, the same root systems, the same way of throwing up a circlet of fronds from a single central spike, as if fashioning a fringed fan with which to stir the air around an ancient deity.

Consider the stubbornness, the sheer dogged tenacity, of those two hundred million years, against these other figures: the species lifespan of the average flowering plant is only about 3.5 million years—a blip of a figure that closely parallels the species lifespan of the average mammal. Having reached that ineluctable expiry date, most living things give up the ghost, hand over their space on the planet to some newer, upstart species better suited to the planet’s changing circumstances.

Consider this: our own species, even with all our long history of literature and progress and scientific endeavor, and despite the fact that we have been around long enough to dream delightful dreams about fern spores and invisibility and awaken to learn that they are false, still, Homo sapiens has only had a mere five hundred thousand years, give or take a couple of hundred thousand, to work on its routine.

Two hundred million years, and how much more than we has the Interrupted Fern already seen? How much will it witness, after we are gone? How it must yawn, to look upon the petty wars and conquests of human affairs. How wise it is to stay so long the same.

I am not like the ferns. I have spent my thirty years on changes and modifications, constantly refashioning my own shapes, mechanisms, and systems in the hope that there is, after all, a better answer. I have been shy as often as I have been bold; I have worn the crown of ambition as often as the mask of nonchalance; I have copied friends and enemies, believing their shapes an improvement over my own. I have been myself a dozen different ways, and still never found the right one. I am trying out a new incarnation right now, in fact—fingers crossed that this time I know what I’m doing—if only you could see me shift.

I admit that I am tired from all this transmuting. I long for those two hundred million, long to stretch like that. Long to peer out beyond the glow of my own small candle flame and gaze at all that has come before and all that will come after. I am hungry for the peace that I imagine must accompany such a lingering existence.

And yet, you know, the funny thing about it all is that when your thumb is as inky-black as mine, the lives of plants seem fleeting and fragile.

I once killed a succulent, those hardy green survivors that—like camels—hoard water within their fleshy parts for dry days, by deciding that the most logical place for it was atop a radiator in December. There it baked and shriveled and, inside two weeks, limply relinquished its grip on life. Growing things beyond number have expired under my care, littering my past with inglorious remains: basil; rosemary; cilantro; narcissus; aloevera; bamboo. Just this afternoon I was re-potting six tiny transplants, baby tomatoes and strawberries grown from seed by a friend with more verdant talents—and even as I gazed upon them tenderly, a faint, funereal voice seemed to whistle past my ears: Poor things, it sang. They’ll be gone before the summer’s out. Every pot on my back deck is a memento mori, a reminder of the impermanence of all things.

But there are different measures of longevity. By one, the meandering lifetime of a human gardener, seventy or eighty years long, stretches out like an eternity, punctuated by the small gasps of scores of individual plants that unfurl and pass away within a season in yard after yard, home after home. By another, the entire collective lifetime of the human species is but a gasp itself—at least when compared with the persistence of ferns.