Everything is gestation and then bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life, in understanding as in creating.
—Rilke
The path of water is not noticed by water, it is realized by water… To study the way is to study the self, to study the self is to forget the self, to forget the self is to awaken into the ten thousand things.
—Dogen
Angels
What does a tree know of itself? Does it know the uneasy beauty of sunlight through its leaves in a cemetery? Does it know the smell of its pollen as it launches from its flowers, the itch as it gathers in tear ducts, the texture as it clumps incorrigibly in sidewalk puddles?
No, if there’s any awareness, it’s the slow and blind awareness of its movement toward the sky and into the deep.
—Or maybe, just maybe, it’s an awareness as alive and ticking as ours, a vivid drama through which each dark winter comes and goes like a blink, each summer plays like a flash in the eyes. As its roots descend into the earth, maybe it scoops through soil like we swim through water.
And does it know of us? Does it sense us as a dull scuttle on its synapses? Or are we angels, dancing elfinly over its roots, reveling in its power and grace, unconsciously guiding it with our touch through a wondrous world we see only through its wooden artifacts?
(Please, if there are any angels here, dancing in the neighboring dimension, this is my prayer: lie at the feet of my otherworldly body. Use me as shelter from the celestial downpour, shade from the harsh light of things beyond our knowledge. Don’t see my loneliness. See how beautiful I am.)
Open
It started raining a hard kind of hot monsoon-y rain, so we canceled dinner. It was early August in Canada, but it may as well have been any other country. We’d decided that this was our last hurrah before we break up—but our flight back was canceled for the storm.
They put us up in a fancy hotel for a couple nights. Cool air blasted from the vent as we lay in our white bath robes facing each other. I watched the glass building through the window as rainfall scattered the reflection of storm clouds. In the foreground, a silhouette of room service leftovers.
It was a lovely couple of days full of tv and towels, and we barely left the place. If only life were as simple as a hotel. That last night we huddled there for a long time, side-by-side in the cold which was in the heat, saying everything which was nothing.
—
In the catacombs of the Newark Airport train station, we stand underneath a tangle of metal waiting for the train back to New York. After a week of sitting in airports waiting for our flights to be canceled she wants to feel the sky over her head, so I follow her out over the platform. It opens bright white above, blanketing us in drizzle.
When she looks at me, her eyes are filled with tears. She doesn’t say anything, she never says anything in moments like these. But in her expression I hear again, No, you’re not a kite and I’m not a stupid rock. You’re a little otter and I’m the shore, and you’ll go play in the waves, but you’ll come back always because it’s safe here…
She knows I won’t—I can see that too.
A few hours later, back in the Upper West, I return her things and help her move out of her sublet.
On the ride home the train car rattles and screeches. I feel a space yawn open inside of me as the world turns to face me.
Reef
Heading down Pier 36, I emerge through a lot of garbage trucks into a view of the East River, right below the Manhattan Bridge. The Q train rumbles through its ribcage as I admire the elegant sweep of the structure from its underbelly, a triumph of modern power and traditional beauty, a lithe skeleton of stone and steel. A few days ago I passed over this very spot on that very train, viewing the teeming reef from above—but for now I prefer to be here, inside the roar of the city, feeling it shake beneath my feet. I look out toward the water while a highway overpass whooshes behind me.
No, not a coral reef—there’s something deeper than life going on here, or separate from it—something indifferent as a blizzard, scintillating as a jungle, powerful and relentless and stoic as a comet. If it had a face… it has no face.
Stirred
When I lived in San Francisco, my favorite place to journey was the coastal hills of Point Reyes. It was kind of a haul—it took a couple hours to careen northward over the foggy Golden Gate Bridge (wet sea air giving way to a smell of dry Californian grass), shoot up past the headlands (Stinson Beach spreading over the horizon as I round the top), dive into the redwoods (taller than the view from my windshield), and jut out over the ocean. Then I would carry myself on foot into the forest as far as I could go without staying past dark. And something would unfold inside of me, quenched.
Now, I’m bursting out of a subway car into Fulton Street Station, aware of my role as an atom in the flow. The subtle nods and nudges, hints of thanks and wrath, that allow us to move through each other in a mad improvised orchestration. All of us stirred to move by something: ambition, heartbreak, a bit of hope. We’ve come to the city to be together, in intimate communion at the culture’s hearth—or to burn in the flame, our routes like filaments of wood.
✤
Beautiful, Miles.
“Holding on is believing that there’s a past; letting go is knowing that there’s a future.”