“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
                there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

                When the soul lies down in that grass,
                the world is too full to talk about.
                Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi

                “Each other” doesn’t make much sense to me. More and more, these days, I don’t feel like an ‘individual.’ The metaphor that keeps coming back, instead, is one string on a guitar. Sometimes it’s a replacement string, left alone in the drawer of this quiet apartment. Not much happens. I’m curled up. Still. Waiting. Sometimes I pick up a book, or look out the window, or water my basil plant, or listen to someone, or write to a friend, or go for a walk, and there’s a guitar again. The bridge and the headstock, the frets, the other strings, and we’re singing. 
                This morning felt kind of fuzzy. Thinking about that now, I don’t mind. I can like the resting times, curled up in the apartment. Then I was standing on a friend’s porch, cold-toed because I’d worn sandals in the freezing snow (I wasn’t there for long). The air wasn’t still anymore. It vibrated. A harmony. We talked about cookies and hot chocolate and plans, and I was more of me in not being only me. The shake of that sound has stayed with me all day, and now it’s back in writing this to you. For a moment, when you read, we’ll be a chord played together. Maybe we always are?
                Looking for “me” on New Years’ Eve, 2017, I walked up into the hills above Santa Rosa, CA. Through trees. The shadows of leaves. Past stones. A rising moon. I walked to a lake, the ripples soft along the shore, and turned back. Stars. Clouds. Hills. The city lights. On my way back down, at midnight, I could hear people cheering. I could hear a tree creaking as it leaned against another. What if the struggle isn’t to ‘find myself,’ but to move past the eggshell of how I imagined ‘myself’ as all this hatches to another moment?