“After a time, he felt a deeper rhythm, the rhythm of the stone and water, not the rhythm of his words and heartbeat. He breathed into this deeper rhythm, let it teach him a new mantra, a wordless mantra that waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed, moon and stars and clouds, river and sun, the wordless singing of the earth beneath it all like the world’s own heartbeat.”
                -Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor, p. 138

                Yesterday over dinner we talked about words, and how words open the space for new kinds of understanding. For example, two years ago I didn’t know what poison hemlock looks like. Then someone taught me, gave me a name for what I was seeing, and now I notice it along streets in Illinois or behind the sand dunes in California. And this evening, sitting beneath a big oak, I heard a squirrel scurrying. Saw the bobbing grass. Listened to the bark against my hand. The pauses in between my partner and I talking, and the touch, as we sat closer, of earth to root to sap to bark to skin to air to leaf to squirrel.
                I almost forgot to post to Uproar today. I forgot because I was outside, looking at a bright star, wondering if it was a planet. Because the night felt so cool after the hot day. One of my favorite parts of Uproar is the rhythm of it, the practice of turning towards a quote that means a lot to me, and sitting with those words. And tonight in the almost-forgetting I’m delighted by losing track of Wednesdays. By listening to sunset, tasting the day’s heat melt into coolness, and breathing towards these rhythms. Sometimes words help me get ‘there,’ but often the words themselves are not where I’m going.