In imagining how the earth might end: “or maybe the earth will shrink / it will get so tiny that we can hold it in our hands / and we’d see every side, every part that we used to ignore / maybe then we’d feel big enough to start protecting it.” -Tillie Walden, “The Fader”

                A few weeks ago, when I started trying to write about Tillie Walden’s “The Fader,” I’d recently gone swimming off the coast of Orcas Island. The water was on the edge between cold and cool. The waves lapped with sunlight, washing out toward other islands. For me, islands have a special way of showing the size of the sea. Looking at that little tuft of land, off on the horizon, makes me feel distance. And I said I swam, but I barely moved away from the beach I came from. A few strokes. I was weightless for a moment, diving beneath the water. Out past me were more beaches, more tufts of land, more watery valleys. 
                I think “The Fader” catches my heart because of how it invites me to think about scale. Last spring a friend pointed out that we spend most of our time in contexts designed for someone about our size. Rooms. Chairs, tables, doorways, cars, refrigerators, as though a human body that’s somewhere around 5 or 6 feet is the measuring stick for the world. My friend said that’s why they loved backpacking. Forests, ridges, rivers, snails, all these have their own scales. And then, of course, in other conversations, we say how small we are—specks of dust on the speck of dust that is earth in the smudge that is the Milky Way in the cloud (or the ocean?) that some of us call the Laniakea Supercluster. And in other conversations we’re so large. Large enough to be pushing (or have pushed) other animals to extinction. To fish until fisheries collapse. To shift the climate. And then Walden writes and draws. My familiar sense of scale shakes, and past it, I wonder what it would be like to feel our smallness (and the world’s smallness), our expanse (and the world’s expanse).

                “The People of Youzhi: In an ancient land in the middle of the Western Steppes, renowned for its beauty and lush flora, has lived this warm and welcoming people. They have mastered the art of zhi and can speak the earthen tongue.”
                -Nie June, Seekers of the Aweto: Book 2 (Strange Alliances), translated by Edward Gauvin and and Helen Chao

                One of the creatures in Seekers of the Aweto—a kind of magical child—speaks only the ‘earthen tongue,’ a mysterious language shown in characters Nie June makes up for the story. We readers can’t understand. Staring at one of these characters, a bit like a cursive r into a u with two dots over it, I start thinking about all the things I can only say by not saying.
                Years ago, while teaching, I invited students to make up words that they needed but English didn’t have. There were some delightful ones. Reading Nie June, I wonder about a different version of the exercise. What are the symbols for things I need to say (or need to hear said) but that can’t be put into any recognizable words? This afternoon, in some tougher hours, I tried to turn back toward what I was feeling and seeing. I’ve been practicing that in the last years. Sometimes naming “it” helps—I’m stressed, or I miss my family. But sometimes there are no names, no words—what symbol for the lethargy of my mind, inside too long on a hot day, and the trees shimmering in a quick wind outside, and the silence after I’ve chatted a bit with my brother on the phone? What sound for a soundless pause of breathing?
                Maybe one I can’t read, in the earthen tongue.

                “I’m glad I’m here with you.”
                -Cody in Ray Nadine’s Light Carries On

                In the last weeks a few books have played with my ideas about what here means, and how we can be here to love each other. One of these is Ray Nadine’s Light Carries On. It’s a love story between Leon and Cody. And Cody’s a ghost. When they go to touch hands Leon’s fingers go through Cody’s. Leon can reach into Cody’s chest, and he feels a chill, but he doesn’t feel skin. At one point the idea of that touchless-ness almost drives Cody away: “I can’t hold your hand or comfort you when you’re sad,” he sobs. But this is a love story. The two find a way to being “here” together, in part, by sharing a love of music, and in part by sharing other moments that they love— the Planetarium, a concert, a beach where they can look back at Chicago’s lights.
                This story might’ve hit me hard because I just flew from Seattle back to Illinois. Over the summer, visiting the West Coast meant moments of connection and love—with my two siblings, my parents, my older brother’s kids, my partner’s family as I get to know them more. With beaches and hills where I grew up. How can all those stay “here” while I’m in Illinois and they’re in Seattle?
                It’s an old question. I’m not sure Nadine’s answer is new, but I did feel it. Like a shared trip to the planetarium. Like looking off at city lights beneath the stars, far away and close. Like ghost fingers on my fingers, and with love they’re here, too.

                “She shook her head. Her steady brown eyes held mine, waiting for me to understand. I leaned in and listened to her with my body, willing her to say what I could not. Our breath rose and fell together like the drawing of tides.”
                -Adam Garnet Jones, “History of the New World,” in Love After The End

                It’s possible to listen with my body, isn’t it? Sometimes I forget that. Adam Garnet Jones brings me back so seamlessly. His passage is about a parent and their child, and it has me wondering about all the different ways I can listen with my body.
                I can listen with my fingertips when we’re holding hands. I can listen by looking, someone’s eyes holding my eyes, as the two are doing in the story. If we’re partner dancing I can listen with my weight, pressing into your hand behind my shoulder. I can listen with my breath. Breathing together, like the story describes here. I can listen with my tongue as I hold the taste of water or an apple slice. Listening can wash through all those ways.
                Lean in and listen with my body. Yesterday my partner and I swam out into the sound from a beach on Orcas Island. I heard the wash of the waves, the depth of the water. Floated for a moment, weightless, hearing the lift of seaweed toward the light, the shadow of seals through the currents. If I listen with my body (water on my skin) I recognize how close I am to these drawing tides.

                “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.” -René Magritte in a 1965 interview

                I ran across this quote sometime in my teens. I found it again in 2019, maybe on the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago, and took a picture of it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Not thinking about it all the time, consistently— the kind of thinking about it that also means forgetting about it, forgetting I took the picture, forgetting I went to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. And then today I ran across the picture on my computer and started wondering, when did I take that?
                Around ten or eleven, I fell in love with watching rivers. The way the current and the waves bend and rise, shaped by (and shaping) the rocks of their riverbed. The rocks, held in place and broken apart by tree roots. The trees, washed by and sipping the water. My parents taught me a kind of ‘reading the river’ that meant looking at what you could see to find something about what was harder to see: the direction of the current, the depth of the water, the way a wave would push a kayak. On Sunday I was out at a glacial river, the water so cloudy gray I could only see a few inches through it, and I thought it must be harder to read a river like that. A river you can barely see into. But I sat watching the water for a bit, and thought, well, it doesn’t seem that much harder. Maybe that’s what we’re always doing. Seeing something and something else beneath it. Seeing a little part of the interaction between river and riverbed and forest, between earth and sky. 
                That reminds me a little of me and the quote from Magritte — a song I hear, and forget about, and stumble back across. And sometimes hear myself humming.

                “My process of selection is driven both by my personal friendship and political networks, as well as by happenstance…” 
                -Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

                I’ve been sitting with how the shape of what I think (and how I think) is also a map of who I know, of what groups have made me feel at home, what friendships I’ve worked to build, what causes I’ve taken up and where I’ve managed to listen.
                There are so many examples. On Friday night my brother and I took his two kids camping, thunder echoing above our heads, and I remembered an early camping trip when I helped carry my little brother (a year old, then, or thereabouts). On that trip years ago we walked in close to sunset, and when my little brother woke up in someone’s arms in the middle of the woods while we set up a tent, I could hear in their child’s voice that all of this felt normal. How could it not be, raised in the family we were raised in? Sometimes you woke up in the woods.
                And of course, since then, my little brother (like my older brother, like just about everyone I know) had challenged the way I think about things. They’ve directed my attention toward different viewpoints, different works of art. Day by day, quietly, they pull my selection of what I believe and what I look at towards what they believe, what they look at. This summer they played me a song I hated. They sang phrases from it. And now, weeks later, that song’s running through my head. It’s more interesting than I noticed at first. I find myself wanting to sing it. And wondering about the viewpoint this song takes up, the implications, for relationships and politics, of what it says.

“To my nieces and nephews, who need a better story — BL
For Kai — MG” 
                -Brittany Luby and Michaela Goade author dedications in their children’s book Encounter

                Encounter’s pages have lots of creatures in them. Seagulls. A mouse. A mosquito. Deer. A crab. Beluga whales. Wasps. A sign of a spider. In a way I suppose that’s true for lots of children’s books, but this one struck me with its shifting, expansive perspective. 
                Building on historical notes from 1534, Encounter imagines “an open and friendly meeting between a French sailor and a Stadaconan fisher” in what is now known as North America. The picture inside the front cover shows a beautiful sunrise seaside, and the view’s closer to a nesting seagull’s view than a person’s. In the middle of the story we spend time with both the French sailor and Stadaconan fisher (shifting between being closer to one, then the other, then close to both). When the animals speak up, Goade’s art puts us close to them. We look down with a seagull toward these two people on the beach. We retreat with a mosquito back into the leaves. When a mouse celebrates some crumbs left behind, we’re down in the grass, the people small shadows on our horizon.
                I love the gentle, generous way Encounter’s paintings bring us from sky  to grass to bushes and back to these humans’ hands. I’m writing this in my brother’s backyard. Three bunnies in view. They seem more interested in the green of the grass than the green of the page, but looking up from the book, I wonder, what do those tall ears make of my typing?

                “One year was enough to sear [the landscape] on the lens of memory…so that, in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that.” -Dorothea Tanning on her time in Arizona, and on her 1944 painting Self-Portrait

                Tanning has me thinking about modes of diary-keeping as modes of memory, modes of thinking.
                For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about phrasing. Over the course of several days I toyed with the sentence above, rearranging words, wondering, forgetting and coming back. When I sat down to write, I habitually reworked the wording another four or five times. Wondering about clarity, sentence rhythm, sound. Wondering what it was that had so struck me as I stood in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looking at Tanning’s Self-Portait—a tiny figure at the edge of an immense landscape, a bit like I was standing, now, before the largeness of her portrait. What’s the idea-seed here, I wonder as I write and rewrite, and more, how does it grow as I water it with words? 
                Spendings lots of time thinking about phrasing changes the way I interact with lots of things. Take song lyrics— phrases stick in my head, and the melodies usually slip through my fingers. Though now I’m thinking about it, a musician friend and I wrote a song together in the last few months, and since then I’ve been noticing melodies more. If diarying is a process of stitching words or shapes or images into the cloth of memories, does that process change what kind of thread my memory is ready for? And how I hold on—make real, for myself, what has happened?
                I have a friend whose sketched “diary” tends to include patterns from people’s shirts. Another friend whose “diary” includes movements, the way they’ve seen people walking. And I wonder, what am I “searing” into my dream?

                “It’s all there. Everything. Take a look.” -Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

                I’m visiting family in California, and there are six small boxes in my mom’s garage marked ‘Azlan OKC.’ In 2019 my mom helped me pack these boxes and send them from Oklahoma City to her house. That was just after I left the high school where I’d been teaching for years, and just before we drove up to Illinois together, my mom and I, storms in our rear view mirror, so I could start graduate school. This summer I open these boxes, sure whatever’s in there is something I can give away. I’ve been living without these for years. And I come face to face with books.
                There are moments in these books. The ones written by the authors, and the classroom moments of talking about these words with my students. The moments of my marks in the margins. The moments I shared with these characters—Anne Sexton in her poetry, Offred in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Amity Gaige’s Schroder, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince; so many others. The moments I sat with them, listened to them, imagined conversations with them while I walked through the woods. There are the moments of sitting with my mom in Oklahoma, deciding what will come with me to a co-op in Illinois with me, and those bring the moments just after, our road trip together, a hotel room in Urbana. A copy of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet isn’t here, as I gave mine to a graduating senior (who called me years later to say they’d just picked it back up). And here’s Richard Wilbur’s poems, which I brought with me from undergrad. Scattered through its pages are so many conversations with friends and so many more I’ve forgotten.
                All these moments, here and not here. I take a look. See the book, and feel for the spaces inside them and beyond them.

                A few weeks ago I read Kessler’s The Gull Yettin, a graphic novel told with no words and sometimes dreamlike scenes that drift and fracture through each other. There’s something in the art style—the bold bright lines, the simple figures—that for me evokes childhood. Like a child drawing their family, drawing the house they come from, or the house that is their imagined home. It reminds me of an interview I heard a long time ago with cartoonist Charles Schultz—I think he said (in explaining some of the themes in his comic, Peanuts) that it seems like most people stop feeling the questions and hurts and confusions they had as a child, but that all those things, for him, never went away. I wonder if all those feelings for most of us never go away, and we just get better at not talking about them. Or maybe worse at hearing what they’re saying to us.                 I’m back in California, a little ways from where I was born. A little ways from where I learned to swim, where I laid awake, too scared of nightmares to fall asleep, where I got lost in stories my parents read me while I played with twigs and pinecones, where I watched an escaped parakeet way up in an oak’s branches and wondered for the first time about pets and cages, trees and open skies. I think that’s why Kessler’s The Gull Yetin sticks with me. I love the kind of art that lets us keep drawing and finding and caring with/for the children there are in everyone we love. Ourselves, I hope, included.