I woke up at 5am to make my roommate breakfast because it’s her first day of school as a teacher. Afterwards I couldn’t fall back asleep and began instead to listen to the early morning. It’s a pleasant if not unerring space to be in. It’s just you and the slowness of the hour, held by an awareness of the moment, steeping in the water of creation, wherein the mind remains quiet and ripe. Here nothing is asked of you except, perhaps, to listen.
In stillness Québec flowers. Like the first shot of espresso or your last kiss of the morning and perhaps even after a perfectly placed line-break, its flavor rolls and multiples, grows and expands the way words and sentences do over full-stops and commas, the longer you linger. So linger a little longer. Come to the realization that tourists and citizens are all the same when they meet your gaze at the windowpane. Listen to how the children speak in footsteps and foreign tongues and still find each other. Notice how even grief is content to waif and flâneur along the cobble-covered streets. Later, when you’re meeting someone for the first time and their hands are already all over you, convincing you that You are a silly American and this is how we will bridge the distance of language, you are ready to surrender. Later, when you’re mouthing your goodbyes at the bus stop, you are ready to depart.
I was walking out of a coffee shop in Oregon the other day when a tiny brown napkin flew across my feet. What followed was a cascade of memories that brought me back to a particularly creative winter.
It was the first year of the covid pandemic (and grad school). I was holed up inside my apartment. The days were lonely at times, but also full of aliveness and energy. I sketched, read, wrote, played guitar, and walked around whenever the wind and snow had settled. “I could spend most of my days like this,” I said to my penpal. We talked about how easy it is to forget things, and then I suddenly remembered the first time I visited New York City.
Hey! It’s my birthday today.
I had planned to write a longer piece on aging, wisdom, and some other things I’ve learned along the way to 30, but honestly I don’t really want to right now. What I want to do instead is train for my half-marathon, chat with my friends (both old and new, online and off), and read good books. I want to learn new things, write songs and poems, and practice the guitar seriously again. I want to simply participate in the world and see what happens when the page isn’t my focal point anymore.
They asked for his time but not how he got there. Did he stumble? Did his body crumble like a soggy crepe held up by the sticks of his legs on his way to a determined mark on a map? Or did he bumble like a bee all grace no trace of a single step with every toe tasting loving the scent of asphalt?
Every day out the door is a new adventure for you. Each step you take holds within it a possibility, an everything all at once, waiting to burst like the teeth of zippers on jeans too intimate with skin. You bring us to squirrels with peach seeds in their mouths; to robins hopping along the grass on their reptilian feet; to stray humans, walking or jogging, in and out of our line of sight. Whatever it is, at any time of day, the movements of the moment go fully noticed. We walk our well-worn routes, zipping and trotting and bumbling along in search of the forlorn in the familiar.
Every morning, I wake to a chorus of birdsong. Sometimes it is accompanied by rain, but mostly there is the sputtering of other early birds. They’re hairy bipeds without the ability to fly, though they do have the ingenuity for it. Today their cars and yet-oiled minds are starting and revving, preparing to drive off to only God knows where in the green mountain state. None of the shops here are open earlier than seven am, so I picture them driving to the head of a hiking trail, Camel’s Hump maybe. It’s possible too that they may be the poor souls who have to prepare the coffee and pastries I will leisure over later while lingering on last night’s fuzzy dreams and their associated meanings.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
We’re grouped on the grass by the lake, somewhere on the periphery of jazz fest, planning a solstice party. Musicians unknown to us enchant and move the crowd, but we are neither enchanted nor moved, mostly because we are plebeians who throw around artless smiles (ty Chekhov for this phrase) like Oprah on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Still, we try to move anyways. We bob and sway and kick and swing and move but fail to dance with swag. Now our artless smiles are accompanied by artless moves. We’re vibing though, which is what counts I’m told.
I’m going through a break-up. We’d gotten back together months ago and tried to make things work again, but most of the time it was more painful than not. I tried to muscle through the pain, but relationships are not meant to be muscled through. There was always something that prevented me from opening up and being my full self, which inevitably led to distance and disappointment. This made me realize, among other things, that I believed I was never supposed to let others down, especially my loved ones. As a result I let myself down, and her as well. We talked through our issues and wishes and reached a mutual understanding that this was the most loving thing we could do for each other.