STEAM beats STEM

These days there are more birds bumping into windows and the walkout doors to the deck. Young of the year have fledged but not yet learned to avoid glass, even that with some warning markings on it. Young Baltimore orioles have been seen at the grape jelly feeder several times this week. We shortened, again, the chain from which the feeder hangs in an effort to keep the squirrels from dumping the jelly onto the ground as they try to feed on it. That seems to be working. It was a field guide that reminded me this is the time of year parents lead fledgling orioles to grape feeders. We hope they’ll remember and return next year.

Baltimore oriole at grape jelly feeder

Photo by J. Harrington

Today we once again stumbled onto some delightful discoveries on the internet, thanks to Maria Popova and the marginalian. The sequence of links we followed from that site is undocumented, but at one point we ended up searching for Jane Hirshfield and Poets for Science where we found The Collection of Banners with poems and Posters with quotes. Also, somewhere along the line, we tumbled onto Janna Levin’s Theory of Doing Everything, which we recommend to those willing to suffer the possibility of headaches by reading about astrophysics and related matter.

Long ago I surrendered any claims religion might make on me, but continue to explore spirituality and am trying to offset an acquired, highly cynical perspective with a regained sense of wonder. (Second childhood time, anyone?) The fact that my astrological sign is Gemini pushes me toward seeing at least both sides of most questions. Nevertheless, I continue to trust science when it’s well-communicated. That helps explain my delight at discovering Hirshfield’s and Levin’s work today. If only most scientists wrote and spoke as well as Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman.

Once again we believe we have presented evidence that Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) provides a more complete, and therefore realistic, worldview than offered by STEM alone. Better humans make better scientists and poets!

On the Fifth Day

Jane Hirshfield
1953 – 

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who worked for the farmers
were silenced,
and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands,
began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak
and were taken away.
The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent. 

Now it was only the rivers
that spoke of the rivers,
and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees
continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence,
and the rivers kept speaking 
of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless,
the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers,
code writers, machinists, accountants,
lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

They spoke, the fifth day,
of silence.

—2017

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