I was a political columnist. Here’s why I’m now searching for hidden beauty

Dana Milbank

Had you asked me until recently what was in the hayfield downhill from my house, I would have replied, “hay.”

Had you asked me to be more specific, I would have considered for a moment, and then told you, “grass.”

And, from the edge of the field, that is very much what it looks like: tinged with yellow and purple, to be sure, yet mostly a mass of undifferentiated green.

But then I spent a recent morning immersed shoulder-deep in that humble hayfield with a team of Smithsonian scientists, and they introduced me to a garden of treasures.

I saw the blossoms of Eragrostis spectabilis, a plant of such delicate lace it could be mistaken for a spider’s web. Its scalelike florets form a color palette from lavender to violet, and its stamens and stigmas look like minuscule purple tulips atop cotton candy.

I saw, too, Setaria parviflora in full flower. Pink stamens burst outward among its bristly hairs, or “awns.” The feathery maroon stigmas rest in the awns, which are dotted with droplets of dew. At the core, its green florets glisten.

And I saw the glorious bloom of Paspalum laeve, whose beaded green florets line the stem so tightly they resemble a caterpillar. From these explode creamy white anthers atop translucent filaments, along with rich purple stigmas that could be tiny feather dusters. My breath caused its pollen to swirl as if I had shaken a snow globe.

They were the sort of delights you might expect to find on a trip to the tropics or the botanical garden, or at least the florist’s fridge. Yet these are the flowers of ordinary grasses - their common names are purple love grass, knotroot bristlegrass and field bead grass - that grow abundantly here in the Virginia Piedmont. Grasses of equal beauty can be found flowering in backyards and urban parks throughout much of the United States through the end of September.

All it takes to reveal their charms is a $9 handheld magnifier (the flowers are roughly 2 millimeters across, or about the width of a nickel) and an hour to wander - and to wonder.

“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,” Walt Whitman told us.

And I believe extraordinary beauty exists in ordinary things all around us, all the time. We just have to slow down long enough to see it.

For the past three decades, I have covered the dehumanizing cauldron that is our current politics, and the last decade has been particularly soul-crushing. I begin today a new column dedicated to reclaiming the humanity we are losing to the savagery of politics, the toxicity of social media and the amorality of artificial intelligence. One of the keys to that recovery is nurturing our innate sense of awe, the feeling we get when we contemplate something so vast and mysterious that it quiets our anxieties and ambitions and puts our differences and disagreements into perspective.

I chose to start this exploration with common grasses and other unpresuming plants of the field, for they show us that awe is accessible to all of us - if we seek it. We feel it gazing at the Milky Way in the night sky far from city lights, or taking in a mountain vista or an infinite ocean horizon. But we also feel it when we encounter an act of moral beauty, or when we pause to admire the shape of clouds or the changing leaves - or even when we take a beat to see the breathtaking architecture in simple grasses.

Research shows that experiences of wonder reduce depression and anxiety, ease loneliness, improve physical health and even lessen the polarization and alienation in our politics. “Awe is really about when you shift your frame of reference, and small things are like that because if you pause and look at them, you see they are made up of all these tiny collaboratives,” explains Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.” It takes us out of our self-centered individualism and helps us understand that we are part of a family, a community and an ecosystem.

“After experiencing awe, you’re like, man, we all are made of cells, we all want the people we love to do well and we all suffer. So it’s the human emotion in some ways,” Keltner says. “All the ambitious, nagging FOMO tendencies of yourself are quieted during awe. … You realize, I’m part of a collective. There are people I’m responsible for and who are responsible for me. And that illusion of individualism fades.”

As I write this, I’ve just learned of the horrific murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the latest act of political violence to make us feel as though we are losing our humanity. It seems at times such as these that things are spinning out of control, that the problems abroad (Russian drones over Poland, Israeli missiles in Qatar) and at home (the National Guard patrolling the nation’s capital, the president feuding with the central bank and public health officials) are so big as to be insurmountable.

Yet it’s precisely when our troubles are greatest that we need to remember to find beauty in the smallest things. A sense of wonder doesn’t make those problems go away - but it can keep us from despair. “When I’m feeling anxious, if I look at something up close and study its beauty, I find the anxiety diminishes,” says Natalie Izlar, the botanist who led me on my discovery of the world of the micro. “When you focus on something outside of yourself, the thing you’re focusing becomes the important thing and everything else takes a back seat.”

Izlar, a grasslands specialist with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute’s Virginia Working Landscapes initiative, was patient with her pupil: One of her first tasks in the field was to point out, gently, that I was looking through the wrong end of my hand lens.

I found her joy among the flora to be infectious. “Oh, it’s lovely to see you!” she told a sprig of Dichanthelium acuminatum. Upon spying an all-white buttonweed flower, shining like an ice crystal, she remarked, “If I were a pollinator, I’d want to lie in that.” Upon spying a species of particular renown - say, a native pasture thistle in bloom - she shouted “prom photo!” then posed for a selfie with her date.

My Smithsonian visitors showed me, in just one 20-foot circle, seven different native grasses and two dozen other species of plants. There grew the southern slender ladies’ tresses, a variety of native orchid with drooping, delicate, vanilla-scented white flowers, which, before they bloom, spiral along the stem in a manner resembling a braided ponytail.

My favorite, called “hairy bedstraw,” flies four perfect purple petals, each about one millimeter in length. In the center, yellow stamens and white stigmas rise, their microscopic white hairs glistening.

The lowly “pukeweed,” so named because its taste will cause you to gag (it’s true: I’ve tried it), cuts a gorgeous figure, its five white petals, long and slender, underneath a dark hood that stands ready to deposit pollen on any visiting insect.

In nature, even pukeweed has its charms.

Much of the magic came from tiny things we hadn’t set out to find. Serendipity led us to a crab spider traveling along its web between two blades of sweet vernal grass as if riding a zip line; a purple-hued leafhopper posing on a stalk of sensitive pea; monarchs, spicebush swallowtails, tiger swallowtails and bumblebees all vying for real estate on a purple field thistle; a wolf spider struggling to carry her huge egg sac; a golden orb weaver wrapping up a meal; and a blade of grass buckling under the weight of two grasshoppers, who struggle to right themselves.

There was something in the field for all the senses: Feeling the oil of the purple top and the seeds crumbling from the beaked panic grass as I ran my hands along their stems, smelling the wild basil, and hearing the calls of the blue grosbeak and indigo bunting, the white-eyed vireo and the yellow-breasted chat, the cedar waxwing and the great crested flycatcher.

After an hour in the field, kneeling and sitting under the canopy of grasses, I felt the urge to lie on the ground, ticks be damned, smelling the rich earth and soaking in the beauty - my cares forgotten for the moment, my mind reinvigorated and my soul full of awe.

For hundreds of years, at least, writers have tried to describe the pull of the small.

In the 14th century, the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich described how a single hazelnut contained “all that is made” by God:

I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness.

And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.

Early in the 19th century, the poet William Blake taught us:

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

At the turn of the 20th century, drawings of marine microorganisms by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel delighted the masses, eager to return to nature in an age of industrialization and urbanization. “In every bit of moss and of grass, in every beetle and butterfly, we find, when we examine it carefully, beauties which are usually overlooked,” he wrote in 1899. “Above all, when we examine them with a powerful glass or, better still, with a good microscope, we find everywhere in nature a new world of inexhaustible charms.”

In our time, when everything is about being big and fast, we are overdue for another such return to the small and the slow.

“The nature of the world is that we humans are so easily impressed by the big things; if you switch on the nature documentary, it’s probably going to be about elephants or big, fierce animals or giant sequoias,” says David George Haskell, a biologist and author of “The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature” and other books about close observation of nature.

“But ecologically the real action is all the microbes and the ants and the caterpillars and the fungi and the tiny little wildflower seeds. And so by paying attention to those through our hand lens and by not rushing around so much so we can notice the smaller things, we actually connect much more closely to the world.”

Just as gazing at the vast fills us with awe, so does observing the small, for both make us perceive that there is so much that we don’t know, and so much happening all around us that we do not control.

“There’s a sense of humility that comes out of that, that the world is just so extraordinarily diverse and complex,” Haskell argues. “We humans think we can manage things and know the answers to everything, but the micro-world especially should give us pause.”

This understanding of our own insignificance helps us to weather the trials that we encounter in our daily lives, often with our faces buried in our phones. “If we’re not paying attention and appreciating and marveling and enjoying the world, particularly in its incredible filigreed complexity when we look very, very closely, we’re losing a source of joy,” he says. “I think most people would agree we need more joy in our lives, especially right now.”

It is particularly rewarding to find the journey-work of the stars in a leaf of grass, for these plants are elemental to human existence. The emergence of grasses 10 million years ago is what allowed the savannas to form, which in turn allowed for the rise of humans. Even before there was agriculture, people either ate grasses or ate the animals that ate grasses. Today, still, the bulk of the human diet comes from corn, wheat and rice - all species of grass. We owe our existence to these plants, and to see them up close - in their intricate architecture and extraordinary beauty - is to understand that we are not here by accident.

This particular source of joy costs us almost nothing. Izlar suggests this inexpensive hand lens, or upgrading to this one for a few dollars more. Newer phones have macro photography mode, and apps such as Halide enhance macro photography on older ones. With that equipment, go outside this month and shoot grass flowers. If the grass has been mowed too short, look for a goldenrod or an aster or other late-blooming flower. Or the bark of a tree. Or a grain of rice. Or a weed between sidewalk cracks. Send me a pic of tiny life that fills you with awe.

But then put away the phone, and spend some time immersed in wonder - at God’s creation, at nature’s ingenuity, or both.

We had been exploring happily in the hayfields for a few hours. Amy Johnson, head of Virginia Working Landscapes, called out the birds she heard while identifying plants. Brooke McDonough, a photographer with Smithsonian, captured the tiny flowers. Intern Matthew Ketner recorded the names of plants. And Izlar kept up her joyous announcements: “We should really get up close and personal with this guy. … Heck yeah! … Just golden, man. … Look at her! She’s beautiful!”

They were beautiful.

The modified petals of the beaked panicgrass, green and pointy, opened like a bird’s beak to reveal its deep purple anthers, while anthers the color of sweetcorn dangled from the golden-brown florets of the yellow prairie grass. The swamp milkweed proffered a dazzling display of whites, pinks and purples. The milk pea, an uncommon vine, folded back its pink, curtain-like petals to reveal yellow stamens. The butter-yellow petals of the St. Johns wort surrounded a creamy center. Yellow, lily-like florets lined the stem of the sensitive pea. The minuscule stamen of the witch grass florets sat atop a white, fluffy bed.

Even the common Carolina horse nettle had something to say for itself, with its large, droopy white petals surrounding golden stamen.

We hear often about plant and animal species hurtling toward extinction as the planet warms and their habitats disappear - and we need to do all we can to reverse that. But we also need to pause for a moment in gratitude for the bounty that remains.

In this unexceptional hayfield, we found grape and ticktrefoil, lyre leaf sage and prairie fleabane, broomsedge and little bluestem, Carolina rose and Carolina elephant’s foot, common yarrow and wild garlic, chicory and wood sorrel.

“So much biodiversity!” Izlar exulted. “You could talk about this for the rest of your life, and you would never cover everything.”

That in itself is cause for joy.