Possibility and limit.
At every encounter, a mutual question, what is this something? and revelations between presences, of possibility. Here fire, here ice, here the light, heat, cool, drip––to be named, maybe, but still not known, and it matters to return often to this place, to remember the limits of language, to avoid equating naming with holding what won’t be captured or even grasped. At best, I can behold, be beholden to––at best, I can be held in my unknowing.
Subterranean symphonies.
To listen through soil is to be reminded of the inadequacy of words for sound, the curious choral cacophony of those out-of-sight creatures so easily out of mind, the soundtracks of springtail, of mellifluent moles mirroring the melodies of mice amid mesh of mycelium; these reverberating roots a revelation, calling a body back to unknowing. This is what the birds are turning their heads to listen for, plainchant of these porous depths, resounding.
***
Inspired by Ute Eberle’s recent Knowable Magazine article about the emerging field of soil bioacoustics, which some prefer to call biotremology or ecoacoustics.
A lesson in surrender.
Before the iron star,
earthquake snaking
over the far side of
dreams, listening for
butterfly whispers
in the hard blue of
a desert sky, a child
holds a foot over a
knee to examine a
thorn. For a moment,
all is the space between
his hand, his foot,
and the tiny barb. What
follows is a long
discovery: how
a body can learn to
abandon itself to
pure endurance.
Notes for a feast.
Collect the fallen fruits of old labors by the light of a full moon. Wade in the water to rinse, then pat dry. Meanwhile, dice the insults, the past indignities, the collected impossibilities and memories of grade school wounds, lost pets, and burned skins. Steam gently on low heat. Now return to the bowl of hopes set aside to rise in a dark place. Knead vigorously on a floured surface for the length of three songs, longer if desired. Set to rise again. Cover and repeat. We’ll score it eventually, with some symbol of our own invention. We’ll bake it golden, display it on a special tray, cut into it while it’s still crackling hot, pass out fat slices to all assembled and serve it with the good butter. Mouths water at the dream, but don’t worry, there is bread already made. It’s on the table right now. We won’t be hungry. It is good to be kneading this together, this now and coming communion. May the nourishment of the earth be yours.
***
Inspired by John O’Donohue, who taught me the Celtic term Anam Cara, loosely translated as “soul friend.” And by my soul’s friend. The italicized line above is from O’Donohue’s poem “Beannacht” (Gaelic for “Greetings”).
What ephemeral forms may expose.
Along the shores of a great lake, often without witness, a northern wind shapes and erases forms in ice and sand. There is a moment when they hold. To bear witness is to be reminded of the pairing of reverence and suddenness, of beauty unexpected because it is so rarely seen, and this because it just as quickly goes, swallowed by the same hand that lifted the veil. Is this a force of time and weather, or their temporary pause? ––as if to call into question all descriptors, all limits, to fit the beholder with a set of melting wings.
***
Inspired by the photography of Joshua Nowicki.
Reins, range, and possibility.
Considering the freedom of a given will, one might ask, which is it: from some impediment, or into some possibility? But here’s a tired habit again, the old insistence on one or the other: acting in nature vs. enacting Nature, and never beyond reach from creation, enduring the fractals of a multiplicity of loves, and the wounds a body learns to bear for their sum, ever toward some abundance of seeming opposites unveiled, this vast body assembled from so many shattered shards.
What calls in response.
Consider a cornucopic mind,
tumbling out into its own
collapse
while gestational stars
assemble before first light
in light of other known principles
for living
––challenge, adaptation, change,
and how these forms grow by
call and response, into what will
persist when life is threatened,
and then try to hold some
stable notion of time.
Whose watch
is the reference?
To the morning assembly.
Cat––
Bed, I––
Coffee, I will.
Sink, please help me.
Pillow, will you stay here?
Wonder, find me again in this haze.
Hope, flood through this dark space.
Heart, pay attention, keep watch, and remember.
Head, stop trying to lead and figure. You tend to get in the way.
Feet, hold still while I find the ground. Then get moving and lift me across.
Water, wash my tired eyes, these shadows beneath them.
Pen, carry on and continue to follow these invisible lines, trust the moving hand, however clumsy and dumb, though it keeps dropping the hold.
We are here today––
Begin again each time it loses the thread, and it is always––
We are here today to––
Dearly beloved.
We are gathered here to
meet these beginnings.
And other directional challenges.
If Dali’s thin silver spoon with its offering of arrested time can bend around a dark mass and still hold; if Magritte’s mountain can levitate and Chagall’s village can highlight the illusory nature of common words for direction: above, below, top, bottom––then there really are no end of possibilities for how a given story may move, fictions of today, tomorrow, and yesterday only rooted in the old habits, which are sometimes shorthand for myopia, and we could hardly help ourselves when it was still possible to paint time in a straight line and call it real.
***
Inspired by “Weightless Forms, Gravitational Forces,” Ch. 23 of Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light.
A mycelium-inspired montage.
Be the hero, we say to one another, of your own life. The logic encourages these rampant proliferating fantasies, each body the focal point of motion. It’s something else to assume a body like a riverbed. One logic trains heroes for noble departures from known worlds across manufactured thresholds, through theme park underworlds and back again, and in the retelling a people can learn to take as given idea of the world as something to travel through––in order to finish on top. It would be another choreography entirely if the crossing in question was over forbidden mountain ranges of the calcified remains that stagnate between the origin of music and the sound of a single voice, bereft of chorus, learning to hear again, a call across hemispheres of knowing, waiting to respond until fully immersed in the dirt, each limb stretching from self into selves into another body entirely, vast and webbed across acres of time, humming Here.
