“Remember this feeling, there is something called love. I would say remember, there is something called freedom, even if you can’t see it. There is me calling you, in a world I don’t control.”
                -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, page 32

                Walking beneath the changing leaves today, the fall light’s glow showing the sycamores green in their growing gold, and my partner and I hold hands to cross a busy street. A few days ago, as we were driving back home, she started giving me a tour of our neighborhood. There’s the gas station where I bought a wrench when your car died. We started giving each other a tour. Every block, a few times each block, there was something to point out. This is where we got our tomato plants. This is where the raccoon lives. This is where we first read Undrowned together.
                Tonight I go back to that. Tomorrow I’ll fly off to an academic conference where, for the second time, I get to hear Alexis Pauline Gumbs speak. That’s wonderful. Today’s been busy. That hustle hustle— there’s always so much on a to do list, isn’t there? And our walks together—the sycamores—our ongoing neighbor-ing with this raccoon—these are the feelings, calling. Guiding. Bringing us home.

                “…thanking the woods as we left, which took the form, mostly, of running our hands along most everything we could reach.”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of (More) Delights, page 12

                Coming out of Sasha Velour’s show “Travesty” tonight—that will be another post, I think, sometime soon, but tonight the music is still reverberating—and feeling the cool air, the brush of a railing’s cold metal, the roughness of a brick wall and then the ridges of a treetrunk before the soft press of the earth beneath the grass. Running our hands over all this is such a delightful way of saying thank you. Of being touched. 
                And again on the walk we just took before going to bed: a burst of Maple leaves. A cool rough stone in our neighborhood park. More grass. My partner’s hand in mine. All these reachings.

                “Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets, page 1

                On a walk tonight, and we had to stop to watch a tree’s lacy leaves breathing in the light of a street lamp. Seen from where we were, the leaves looked almost white. Or snowy. Or moonlit reflection on water. Just as permeable, drinking in the world. 
                Maybe it was the street lamp and the angle we were looking from, and who knows, maybe my tired eyes. I’ve walked that street a lot lately, and I don’t remember any tree with leaves the color we saw tonight. But then again, how often do I take the time to fall in love with a color? Too rarely, I think. Maybe that’s the point of asking. But since seeing the tree I keep falling in love with colors: the blue-black-dim of the shadows behind the white leaves, the blue of Nelson’s Bluets, waiting for me back on the desk, and the paler teacup blue of a note from a friend that peaks out from beneath a stack of work papers on my desk to say “Hi, Azlan!” in my friend’s dark blue pen. The red of a pencil at my elbow. The pink of my partner’s water bottle. Maybe Nelson’s right. When seeing becomes permeable, becomes drinking in the world, it’s a kind of falling in love.

“once

we were not afraid
to blow away”

-Alexis Pauline Gumbs, from “Walking to Arawak Road”

                My partner and I are walking twice a day, first thing in the morning and near last thing at night, and I’m learning all the different things these walks can be. I think I’ll keep learning for as long as we walk them. Sometimes they’re banter, playful, tidbits of thoughts and jokes and possibilities. Sometimes they’re more logistical, the planning taking over: all that sequence of when we’re getting groceries and who needs to be where when and how many zucchini we still have. (Tonight: three). Sometimes they’re quiet. Tired from the long day, or still waking up from our sleep, we walk along to the sound of the wind and the changing shadows of the clouds. The first few times that happened I wondered if I was doing something wrong in not “carrying” the conversation. I wondered if it would get boring. I’m realizing how fully it doesn’t. The silence is a sky we blow out into. There’s rain here, and clouds. We blow into thoughtlessness. Into rhythms.. Then someone puts a hand on someone’s arm, and we pause. Look. A raccoon beneath that three, looking at us, scenting the wind to ask whether it’s time to keep blowing along or time to slip back inside a warm den.