“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
                of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
                The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” -Elizabeth Bishop, from “One Art”

                On November 1st I got to hear Alexis Pauline Gumbs talk, and I wanted to write tonight’s post about something she said. But I’ve lost the paper with my notes. It’s been a frustrating day, anyway, and running around my house those notes felt like something I had to find. And Gumbs also talks about loving whales when they’re close so she can see them, and when they’re far, deep, awash in a place she’ll never know. That made me think about having.
                So much of graduate school is predicated on having more and more. More knowledge, more expertise. So much of the American idea of success is predicated on having more and more. And losing isn’t very hard to master. I was so upset, as a kid, when I lost the mechanical pencil I used to do my math homework. The pencil was how I worked, working was how I did well, doing well was—was what I had to be doing, wasn’t it? And it’s so easy, sitting here and thinking about losing, to turn losing into a kind of having. I still have my memories of Gumbs’ wonderful talk. I still got to see her. (US media likes this losing that is a having. We’ll always have Paris, says Bogart in Casablanca). But tonight, instead, I’m thinking about whales deep beneath the waves. I’m thinking about friends I’ll never see again. Friends I’ll never get to make. Somewhere along the way I learned to keep every scrap of paper, every line of writing, like catching at seaspray. I don’t think this is a post about “letting go,” or something simple like that. As a kid I was terrified by the depth of the sea. Pulling at my feet. Endless. Tonight is sitting with the kid who can’t bear to lose a pencil. Swimming with the kid who’s frightened by the depth of the sea. Swimming with me. And feeling something sink down, away. Losing. None of this was ever mine. How can I stop trying so hard to “keep” a touch of the waves?

“I have not said a word
aloud all day.
Sounds cease.
Silence, solitude,
Peace.”
                -Ursula K. Le Guin, from “At Cannon Beach”

                I want to make room for quiet, for not doing, for peace. Over the last year I’ve tried describing this space as a pot of soil on my windowsill. Carefully tended. Watered every now and then. Rich damp loam, rich to my fingers, in which I plant no seeds. Caring, instead, for the soil that is already there.
                Today I had several Tasks, and I did most of them. Not quite as many as I’d planned. It usually goes that way. Then I had five-ish hours on zoom for different commitments, and by the end, the noise of the screen and the speakers had me buzzing till I wanted to close my eyes. Don’t get me wrong: I liked the meetings I went to, and the people I met with. And I’m not sure I’m looking (like Le Guin) for sounds to cease. But after the last meeting, and after sitting for a little while, I went for a walk with my partner. Some of the maples are still holding their bright yellow leaves, flickering like bright currents of water washed up into the sky. Other trees have dropped all their leaves. Dark silhouettes. A couple talked on their way to the same park bench I’d been thinking of sitting on with my partner. We chatted a bit, my partner and I. We walked quietly. Cool evening air. Footsteps. A sky so deep, beneath the clouds, that you could swim in it. Maybe we did. I have a habit of filling my life with this and this and this, the trees and the bench and the clouds. Now I remember the and, the and, the and. The places between where I’d been looking. These openings. These presences. Peace.

                “The kaval’s institution is the village, and that institution got destroyed long before the flute’s institution of the orchestra started to crumble.” -Dani Nutting in the Q&A following “Flutes as Time Shelters: Bulgarian Becomings and the Instrumental Past,” Nov. 1, 2023

                Where do we go to learn? Who do we go to, and what kind of community do we imagine finding there?
                My friend Dani Nutting studies Bulgarian flute traditions. Earlier today I got to hear her speak, and wrote down this line from her answer to an audience question. In her talk, she’d discussed a Bulgarian flute tradition that was rooted in folk music and traveling musicians who played the kaval by ear. She’d also discussed a Bulgarian flute tradition, more “classical,” that arose after the import of classical music from Western Europe. This tradition saw itself as competing on an international stage. It was housed in schools that worked toward prestige, and invested in creating orchestras. The changing shape of these institutions (Dani emphasized) changes how we learn and make art and relate to each other.
                For years now I’ve seen these advertisements from MasterClass. Learn chess from Garry Kasparov, or “The Art of Storytelling” from Neil Gaiman. And don’t get me wrong, I like Neil Gaiman. But my favorite harmonica lesson was from a high school student of mine, sitting at the little pond on our campus. My point isn’t that my student Bobby was a “good” musician. Or a bad one. Maybe I’m trying to say that Ted talks bother me because there’s only one person on stage, and there are so many more in the audience, and I wonder what they would say. Beyond that, though, Dani helps me consider the scale I think about when I think of learning. And about the different ways that different scales nestle “art” into our lives. Sometimes I think of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with 55,000+ undergraduate and graduate students. Sometimes I think of a little pond. Sometimes an orchestra, sometimes a village, and all these places go growing and changing and weaving into each other.

                “There is no need to arrive somewhere—each step is the arrival to concentration, joy, insight, and the momentary enlightenment of aliveness.” -Thích Nhất Hạnh, How To Walk

                I’ve been saying I feel tired lately. Wondering how to recharge my energy. Then last week I walked with my friend, and they told me they don’t think “energy” is really a thing. Or it’s not what I usually pretend it is, at least. A living body isn’t a battery, it doesn’t have a single kind of electrical charge poured in and pulled out to turn the fan blades or shine the light. Instead of having energy to carry us through and keep us going and create with, my friend and I started talking about all the different things that lift us in our lives.
                Joy. Joy is one for me. And pleasure, which is why I start reaching for something tasty when I’m struggling with a project and telling myself keep going. Concentration, that act of bending my thoughts in one direction—focus on the keyboard, not the wind in from the window. After enough concentrating my mind wants to swim off, more a dozen minnows in a lake than a single sailing ship with a rudder. Or wants to drift, dandelion puffs on the sky. For me there’s also a sense of performing, of putting myself together to show some certain side. After enough of that I’m in my boxers with messy hair.And curiosity: a pull toward why and what and wow, but sometimes that pull fades, or I’ve asked too much from it, and it goes quiet. Silence. That’s another thing that carries me. And love, alive in so much of what I do, and fear, alive in so much of what I do (as I try to help), and the shadows where love and fear aren’t currently lapping. So joy, pleasure, concentration, performance, curiosity, love, fear…strand by strand, I’m untying the knot, touching all the threads I usually pretend are just energy.
                Which means tired (and awake) aren’t a single somewhere I leave behind, or get to. The dance has more steps than that, and more stillnesses.

                “Unlike me, my character has the opportunity to have a heart to heart with her mom before she dies.” -Kaighla Rises

                Today I’ve been teaching at a writing retreat in Allerton—a mansion, now a retreat center and park, some thirty-five minutes from my home in Illinois. I got to meet Kaighla. In the same session where I wrote down her comment, quoted above, she wrote down this from me: “I love writing for what it can make true.”
                At around the time when my grandmother was moved to hospice, I brought my laptop to the hospital bed where she’d been sleeping. I wish I’d done it sooner. I chatted with her about her childhood, about her mother, about memories I’d never asked about. She answered some questions. Evaded others. So far I haven’t “done” anything with the writing from that afternoon, but I’m so glad, looking back, that I have that moment to reflect on. To hold. To ground into as memory and connection. Today, in another session, I was talking with a writer about their family memoir, and we started talking about inviting family members to contribute—writing letters, maybe, explaining the project and asking if people wanted to respond by sharing a story. I don’t know if that writer will ever make the invitation. If they do, I don’t know if it will be taken up. And of course, writing a novel where the character gets to have a heart to heart with their mother that you never got to have with yours isn’t going back in time, isn’t changing what happened. But it is love and hope for what was and what might be, isn’t it? It is a way of saying please, and feeling, and making space to hear whoever answers.

                “I want to talk to people who think like me, because they don’t think like me.”
                -David Wright Faladé

                I’ve been struck lately by how little I understand the movements inside what someone’s saying—and even more, the thinking behind those movements. Sometimes when it seems we agree, when we approach things in similar ways, I tend to assume we’re on the same ‘side.’ (As though different ways of thinking can be well imagined as sides). And so often we’re not.
                Here’s an example: months ago my friend and I were weeding in a garden. It was a pleasant kind of work, the shade and the sunlight, the repetitive, sensual task of touching leaves and stems. The gentle recognition of noticing the difference between garlic shoots and grass stems and peas and oxalis and all the other things I don’t have names for. Inside that task, I mentioned something about how peppers are spicy because the plant is “trying to stop itself from being eaten.” The plant wants its fruit to fall around its seeds, to decompose and become nutrients for those seeds. I was taught that sometime, way back in middle school. My friend (a much, much more engaged gardener than I am) listened, let the remark go, and circled back to it. The first thing I thought I understood in what they were saying was that lots of plants grow by having their fruit and seeds eaten and so spread about. Which would mean, in a way, that the plant wants its fruit eaten. I interpreted this as a strategy, as though the plant were playing games to maximize its chances of survival and reproduction. Then I listened to my friend some more, and I realized their ground level engagement with the garden was different. They said something like, “Everything kinda gives back, doesn’t it?” Not that the plant was using a strategy of seed transportation by birds’ stomachs, but that they understood plants as part of ecologies, and understood ecologies more in terms of relation and gifting than in terms of individual competition.
                In that string of moments, trailing back toward my middle school class and forward toward now and including those moments of kneeling in the garden, I started trying to understand this one small piece of how my friend thinks. Which is not like me. The more I sit with it, the more I think about all the different ways of thinking and being unfolding all around me. The grass. The peas. The garlic. The oxalis. All the plants I have no name for.

“…what happened? Did you find her?”
“…No.”
                -Chris W. Kim, Adherent

                [Plot spoilers ahead!] I’m not sure what to think of Adherent. At its heart it’s about Em, a young woman growing up in a small quietly post-apocalyptic society, and her search for a writer whose scribbled notebooks seem to hold some secret. Some treasure. Some curious hope. The story’s a fable, maybe, about how hard it feels to communicate. After a long journey through different communities (a kind of travel that people in Adherent don’t usually do), Em finds the writer. She talks to them. She sees the way forward that the writer is pointing, and decides she won’t follow it. The writer will never go back home. Em wants to. When she gets back, Em’s friend asks if she found the writer. After the quiet beat of a still frame Em answers, “No.”
                I think Kim overturns, or perhaps rewrites, that trope about ‘getting everything you dreamed of and it’s nothing you want.’ If I get what I wanted, and it turns out rotten, empty, then it feels like I’ve done something wrong. I’ve desired wrong. The world’s horizons pull in. I’ve read that story. But instead, in Kim’s hands, the journey isn’t finished. It’s not that I started running and it turns out regularly running sucks (true story. Why do people do that?). It’s that I thought about more regular habits of delight in movement, fast-hearted joy in sweat, and the first way I tried wasn’t it. No. Which opens the way for more possible yesses. If the story I usually read closes down the world, limits that sense of possibility and wonder, Kim’s story gently opens far horizons and the leaves at my feet. The last pages of Adherent show us the forest. Scattered leaves. I haven’t found the connection I meant to find. But there is so much possibility here.

                “I can’t recall much from when I was little.” -Briana Loewinsohn, Ephemera

                I’m not sure how much I can recall from when I was little. I remember being surprised when the tadpoles changed, and never being able to catch the moment when tadpoles grew legs and became frogs. They were boring until that moment when they’d already been marvelous. I remember walking along a steep creek with my parents and older brother. I usually didn’t like hiking the way my parents did, but the creek’s little waterfalls and pools conjured worlds of tiny towns with pebble sized houses next to the water. Fairy houses, my mom might’ve called them. They made me into something of a giant, or maybe a cloud, drifting by and curious and half real to them as they were half real to me, and usually I was little (am I six, in this memory? Seven?). And as a child I knew there was a poetry to size and scale, to how we imagine ourselves as bigger or smaller, casting shadows over tadpoles as we stand in a tree’s dappled shade.
                Loewinsohn’s memoir plays back and forth through time. After pieces of her sometimes fraught relationship with her mother, we get a page of her as a child lying next to her mom. On the next two-page spread, we see Loewinsohn-as-an-adult lying on Loewinsohn-as-a-child’s other side. The three share the space: a woman, a child, a woman who is also the child. Reading, I’m struck by how so many of my words for the past pretend I’m attempting to re-create something. To recall my childhood. To remember. I’m struck by how time plays both ways, the kid I was sitting here looking over my shoulder, curious about the words I’m typing (and wanting to go find some tadpoles, wanting to see the magic, though a little in love with missing it and so knowing it’s somehow washing beneath the surface). And the adult I was (before I sat here as a kid again) looks at the kid, a little wistful, a little confused and a little kind about the kid’s big thoughts and confusions. We take care of our many selves through time, don’t we? The child points out squirrels looking at me. The adult shares it’s okay that you’re scared. And not just our selves, but our communities. We lie down in the grass together. It’s more a washing together than a recreating: I might not recall much, but I’m calling so much from when I was little, and so much from when I was little is calling me.

                “Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.” -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

                I have this experience of looking. Searching, you could call it. I remember one rough night, in undergrad, where I sat crying alone beneath a tree on memorial hill, wanting someone to talk to. And that loneliness is real. I don’t want to dismiss it, but I also remember all the people I met, all the people who welcomed me, and beyond the people, that tree (which I also remember climbing), that hill (where I sat watching lightning stitch through the sky), that sky (where birds came visiting, singing about spring). More recently, as a big social gathering, I felt the pull of this person and that person and another person I wanted to meet. My eyes kept glancing around. Which meant away from the people I was talking to. And then I felt a quiet moment of oh yes, here.
                If we sink a spoon into that fact, Gay writes. And eating oatmeal this morning, I wanted to sink my spoon into the quiet moments between looking. I mean: I went for a walk and a blackbird landed in the tall grass, and for a moment that was all there was, all there needed to be. Joy. I mean: I’ve always loved taking the bus because sometimes a bus driver asks “how’re you?” and I say “I’m enjoying that it’s a little cooler, how are you?” Joy. I mean mosquitos still bite my ankles when I go outside, and that’s itchy afterwards, but everytime I sit on the grass I’m awash with roots and fluttering leaves. In the spaces between (and beneath, and beyond, and instead of) my searching, there is such a depth of connection, of relating to one another. An overlapping us that washes outward. And this morning I dipped my spoon into that along with my oatmeal. It tasted like evening light through a glass of water when the crickets are chirping.

                “To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

                I’m thinking about the possibility of passion, desire and delight inside the classroom, and near the classroom in other education spaces. Of course hooks doesn’t mean “eros” as in (only) sexuality. She means — well, it’s Chapter 13 in Teaching to Transgress, and I’ll call it a lift and a want and a yes of the heart, mind, and body. Reading hooks, I feel that passion, that possibility of engaging with each other as we become ourselves and become a community. That feeling is rare in most of my reading/studying/writing. I could wonder why, but instead, right now, I’m remembering.
                Remember when you were showering and a question came to you, a how or a what about, and the question washed with the water across your skin? And the water soaked into you, like rain into earth, waking seeds? I’ve lived that. I’ve also “learned” to stop following those questions, but I think we can learn to believe in them and share them again, too.
                Remember when you read that poem (or that song lyric) that took a secret part of yourself, a locked room that you didn’t visit and certainly didn’t share, and spoke to you there?  Spoke to you of the locked stale air but also of the door, the lock that could be unlocked, the window that could be open, and as the poet said themselves you realized I’ve felt that way but didn’t know how to say it? I remember that.
                Remember when we started building something together, I can’t remember if it was a garden between our houses or a book we wanted to co-write, and the could be of our making became a river carrying us along to maybe and we’ll see? I remember that, too.