“It was a burnished, cloudless day with a tug-of-war wind, a fine day for flying. And so Raglan Skein left his body neatly laid out on his bed, its breath as slow as sea swell, and took to the sky.
                He took only his sight and hearing with him. There was no point in bringing those senses that would make him feel the chill of the sapphire-bright upper air or the giddiness of his rapid rise.”
                -Frances Hardinge, Gullstruck Island (in the US it’s The Lost Conspiracy, but that’s so much worse)

                The magic in Gullstruck Island means that some people can send their different senses out to move through different places. So your eyes could be thousands of feet up in the sky, looking down at rooftops, and your hearing could be near the soup pot with its happy bubbling.
                Lying in bed (and walking around, and sitting on the bus) in the days since I finished Gullstruck, the idea keeps coming back to me. I lie in bed and (almost) drift through the walls, listening to my neighbor’s hammering. I look out the window on the bus and see someone running, and for a moment my eyes (almost) stay with them, watching their coat swing, their cheeks grin, (almost) feeling the muscles pulling in their legs. And of course, I know what it’s like to leave a sense behind. To be so engrossed in my phone that I stop hearing what someone says, or so focused on the TV show in front of me that I keep ignoring the ache starting in my slumped back. And I know the opposite: know moments of rock climbing where I’m so intent on moving that moving is all I feel. 
                Maybe they drift around more than I usually think, these senses of ours. There’s something disembodied about this version of magic that makes me uncomfortable, but there’s also something perfectly embodied in touch dripping down over leaves, like rain, or hearing drifting on the wash of the waves. Which my hearing does, sometimes, even from out here in Illinois. Because I grew up near the coast. Does your hearing do that?

“i’m scared / i’m trusting
i’m contained / i’m in motion
we’re shook / we’re normal
we’re here / we’re gone
and time goes on” 
-adrienne maree brown, “in the corona,” Fables and Spells

                I’ve wondered a lot about the pressure of language to say “this,” or “that” — to put words together into a string so that (right now) I’m telling you about my language-wonders instead of about how, when I read brown’s poem, I sat resonating in the space of that / . 
                This pressure toward a linear understanding, it’s a habit of thought as well as a means of making. Text on a page, the convention of lines, maybe all that creates an “argument” where I’m making a “central point,” but I’ve also spent so much time learning to use words to make an argument. I’ve learned to think in an argument toward a single thought that’s “true.” And words — minds — also do other things. 
                How often do you feel a monolith, and how often a chorus in a rainstorm? How often do you think a kind of sluice, the water hemmed in on all sides and going where its directed, and how often do yu think waves washing on the shore, retreating back around the rocks, rising to wash again? For the last few years, my favorite metaphor for a certain type of thought is rain. Rain that patters down, that discovers by touching, that falls ecstatically over whatever’s there. That gathers into streams or seeps into the ground. Words to  do that, too. So many of the words I have run off in many directions. So many of the words I mean themselves mean many things at once.
                “i’m scared / i’m trusting”
                i’m tired / i’m drifting like moonlight
                here’s what brown taught me / i feel brown with me
                saying time / with time inside what she says

                “In the language I was raised in, “here” means “this place where we are,” and it also means “here” as in “I give this to you.” Could I learn from the Indus river dolphin a language of continuous presence and offering? A language that brings a species back from the bring, a life-giving language? Could I learn that? Could we learn that? We who click a different way, on linked computers day and night?” -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

                Here. I’d like to give this to you. 
                I’d like to give you the here where I am, the dark window with the whisper of branches and a far away car, the carpet as I sit cross-legged typing on the coffee table. Can my sentence about the coffee table be a “here” where we’re close to each other, even from far away? Can I respect your “here” as a presence and an offering? Can I find a language that acknowledges the offering in the presence, the presence in the offering?
                Sometimes I think about new languages. In proper science fiction terms, those are usually knew alphabets, new mediums — morse code with its dots and dashes, or aliens whose language lives in splashes of color across their cheeks. And those are wonderful. Reading and rereading my slow way through Gumbs’ book, I feel the closeness of another, slower kind of language learning. The way she uses questions has a different taste than almost everything else I’ve read. It’s more generous, more open.
                I don’t quite know what I mean. But months ago, sitting on a porch with my friend, I did my first woodblock print. It was fun, feeling the chisel move through the woodgrain. I did something blocky, new — you could see I was learning the tools. Then I looked at my friend’s print. In their hands, thin cuts behind larger cuts created depth to a landscape of rolling hills. My image was a shape cut into wood. Their image, their cuts into wood, opened a world between the marks. What new languages are already alive inside these old letters? Can we learn that we are already learning? Can we swim with the wash of ocean questions?

                “Academic nonfiction tends to create distance between the author and what’s being talked about, and between the affective experiences and relationships to it. Poetry is the exact opposite. Poetry cracks open the rib cage and makes you write with that arterial ink.” -Jenny L. Davis, Poet, Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies

                I wonder about the ways this manufactured distance between me and what I write functions to create distance between me and what I do. I wonder if, through this distance, I position myself to carry out a role that I’m troubled by, to treat people or communities in ways that “I” never would but that my place in a system says I should.
                For instance: education. The phrase, “I’m your teacher, not your friend.” The first time I had to assign my students semester grades, I felt angry and sick for days. I almost quit teaching. I didn’t want to rank these people who I’d come to know and care about. Even if I convinced myself I was ranking “their performance in the class,” I couldn’t believe a) that there was actually a single rubric by which I could rank them, b) that ranking them was more helpful than hurtful, or (a distant third) c) that I knew them in a way to say, “Ah, yes, you above you.” I wanted to see them as learners and companions, jokesters and thinkers. As friends. Then I assigned grades. For twelve years I’ve kept assigning grades, because I “have” to—or at least, because I want to be a teacher, and that’s what teachers do in the systems where I work. “I’m your teacher, not your friend” creates a kind of conceptual gulf between me and them, between what I felt about what I was doing and what I was doing, between the hurt of grading and grading. Which makes grading easier to do.
                Some people might say, “Sure, and sometimes we have to do things that are unpleasant in the moment but important overall. Get over it.” Maybe sometimes they’re right. Reading Professor Davis, I’m more interested in asking, Where can I write with my arterial ink? Where can I follow the opened-up chest of what I believe into deeper connections? A sense of why this matters to me might guide me through those hard moments, just like distancing myself was supposed to do. I trust more poets then academics. Could a sense of why this matters also bring us to the moments where we can break through a system’s have tos, and find another way?

“So we might understand each other better:
I’m leaning on the cracked white window ledge
in my nice pink slippers lined with fake pink fur. 
The air conditioning is sensational. Outside,
we’ve put up cheap picnic table beneath the maple
but the sun’s too hot to sit in…”
                -Ada Limón, “How Far Away We Are,” Bright Dead Things

                So we might understand each other better: I’m sitting at my kitchen table while last night’s snow melts, washing the dark streets into mischievous mirrors that half hide and half reflect the tall trees above them. An hour ago I had lunch. Lentils, onions, zucchini, kale. Delicious. Steaming hot. In a little while I’ll go for a walk, unless I lie down on the floor and watch the place where the walls and the ceiling become the corner.
                Earlier today I talked with my PhD advisor Lindsay Rose Russell about how I start approaching gender and gendered identities in the first chapters of my novel. We were sitting at Cafe Kopi, a table and her tea and a pleasant hour of conversation settled between us. She listened, and thought for a moment, and then started, “Well, in my own experience…” and went into a little story about a moment she’d lived that started forming the way she thought about gender. I listened to that story inside the story of this snowy day, our wooden chairs, this afternoon talking together at the cafe while a stranger I recognized (I’m not sure from where?) came and sat at a nearby table.
                Limón (and Lindsay) suggest a kind of writing, a kind of inviting through words, that I’ve been more and more drawn to in the last few years: the chance to ground whatever we’re sharing in a place where we live. Limón’s table beneath the maple tree, my kitchen table, the cafe, the childhood classroom Lindsay told me about — I think we understand each other better through living together, the embodied moments of this snow melting, that light falling, wherever you are. Sometimes we get those moments in person. Sometimes we can share them from far away when we start writing by saying, I wanted to tell you, I’m sitting at 3:13 this snowy afternoon and outside the streets are mischievous mirrors.

                “In a striped dolphin school, only up to one-third of the school is visible at the surface. What scale and trust would it take to rotate our roles, to work not to fulfill a gendered lifetime ideal (husbandwifemotherfatherdaughterson) but to show up and sink back, knowing there is enough of all the forms of nurturance to go around in cycles?”
                -Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

                I’ve been thinking about the different roles I take up in this dolphin school community of mine. Cook, sometimes, on lazy Sunday mornings, and sharer-of-food on Sunday night when a friend comes over or Thursday night when I go over to a friend’s. Teacher. Student. But more than those nouns, I’ve been thinking about the ways we show up and sink back. On Saturday I talked for almost two hours with a friend I’ve been missing for months. It was wonderful, and now it might be another few months until we have a chance like that again. The other day on the bus I leaned my head on the window and watched the water bead down the glass. I forgot my keys, and a friend let me into the office. I bought another friend nachos. I heard about someone’s break. Someone asked me, “How do you make community,” and I said “I don’t know,” and we talked about it for a while.
                All this becomes a thought about community, about our interweaving lives. About the chance to be nurtured by (and to help nurture) so many of the swimmers around me in some many changing ways. I’m so grateful for that school, and for all the ways it teaches me — lets me — inspires me — to be part of it.

“‘We, uh, we don’t all see the same thing when we look at something.’
‘True,’ said Sherng. He probably thought Jess was reciting a platitude, instead of making a statement that was very literally true for her at that moment.”
                -Zen Cho, Black Water Sister

                I love this quote in so many ways, but I suppose I’ll talk about just two.
                One: a friend of mine likes watching horror movies. I hate horror movies. But as we sit and talk, it’s clearer and clearer that we don’t do the same thing when we’re watching them. For me—it’s hard to say, but they feel like jump scares and gore-for-gore’s sake, technologically enabled. I don’t like those images in my head. Besides, their horror feels like a distraction from all the very real things we do have to fear. For my friend, I learn as I listen, some horror movies create space for exactly those very real things we have to fear. They create a stage on which we can look at what we’re usually so busy ignoring. They also, sometimes, create a kind of safety: by having a space to look at horror, my friend also finds more space to look in other directions.
                I want to watch horror movies the way my friend does. We have a loose plan to try sometime: they’ll pick a movie, and we’ll watch it together. Even that, sitting side by side, won’t be enough. Maybe they’ll talk to me about how the movie unfolds for them, about how they respond to it. Probably I’ll have to practice. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to be less sure— less sure of me, of my assumptions, of how I usually do things, so another way of doing can come in.
                Two: so many important statements can be mistaken for platitudes. I had another friend who suggested that most of the lessons we need to really understand are simple, the kind of sentences a five year old could easily come up with. The thing is, my friend said, it takes us decades to get back to that simplicity and feel it. 
                “Like what kind of lessons?” I asked them.
                “I can’t tell you,” they said. “I’m still trying to understand them. And besides, they’d sound like platitudes.”

“I take meetings, I make phone calls, I shuffle paper around, and I have no idea what the hell I actually do.”
“Maybe if you did you’d like it more.”
                -Amy Sherman-Palladino, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

                Partway through my MFA, I talked with a professor about “understanding.” “Understanding”—knowledge—didn’t really seem like the goal my readings and conversations and writings moved towards. My professor asked me what I was (trying) to move towards, instead, and at a loss for words, I eventually suggested “engagement.” I’m not sure if that’s “right”—I’m not sure if it needs to be—but every now and then I go back and wonder about it. Tonight my friend Ishita told me a story in which she, celebrating with friends, said happily that her core value was romance. A romance with the world. A resonating connection.
                So many of the delights in my life come from being engaged: from noticing this as something that matters, that I want to pay attention to. I can hate sweeping, or I can love it when I feel the weight of the broom, hear the rustle of the bristles across the floor. Sometimes, when I pick up a new book, there’s a moment where I can’t get in yet. I don’t know who these names are, what world they’re in. If it’s nonfiction, I don’t know the perspective of the author, the contexts of the words they’re sharing. And then, when I keep reading, the book becomes a world that opens. Sometimes I’m sitting trying to write and my nieces come running up because I’m a dragon and it’s time to play tag. I get, of course, that sometimes there are good reasons to say “not right now, I want to finish this,” but I love the moments when I say “yes” and go running off with them—when I feel my stretching dragon wings—when their running feet aren’t a distraction or an interruption, but part of the place we’re sharing. 
                Maybe I should go back and tell that professor I meant “connection.” Or maybe I meant each conversation, each playful, confused, excited exchange we share, dancing together between questions and thoughts and the world in which we have them.

                “[…] the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned or uncovered during beginning, middle and final stages of the writing.”
                -Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands

                Anzaldúa is talking about writing, about fleshing out (as the phrase goes) an idea once we already have the bones, but the thought sticks with me both as a literal description of a growing body and as a metaphor for so much. We have so many phrases about backbones, about skeleton crews (the minimum that can still function) or characteristics that are bred in the bone (and therefore hard to change), about skeletons as the ‘essential’ structures that hold us up, but it’s not like bones do much on their own. It’s not like bones create the flesh around them. So I sit here, thinking about soft stem cells, thinking about the softness in which all of me coalesced together. 
                And then metaphors. So often I’m left, wondering when something happened, when I started a certain habit (when did I start waking up later?) or a certain project (when did I really start writing my novel?), wondering what the essential core is for some part of my life. The bones. Someone asked me, “When did Urbana start feeling like home?” Or another time, “When did you and Dusty become friends?” Or another time, “When did you know”—that you were in love, that you were happy (or sad), that you were connected (or alone), that it was time for a walk (or a rest)? And I think about vague and broad shadows. I think about what is “discerned or uncovered during beginning, middle, and final stages.” Perhaps paradoxically, I start moving away from “stages”—from beginnings and middles and ends—towards ways of being that are growing and dying in many places in many ways, all at once. And that’s lovely.

                “How can anyone say what happens, even if each of us dips a pen a hundred million times into ink?” -Rumi, “The Steambath”

                Lately I’ve been happier, and happier that I can’t explain very much at all. Maybe happy’s not the right word?
                I keep reading another book (or talking to another person) who suggests, think of it this way. And this way is lovely.
                 I used to think I’d figure things out. I remember a Philosophy class that was designed to walk through one ethical system after another. Was morality based on what some particular God ‘wanted’? Was it based on virtues? Or the highest good for the highest number? Or…something else? The brilliant professor arranged the semester so each system’s failings pushed us toward a new system. And that system had failings, too. At the end we were back where we started. I was as confused as ever. I had more questions than ever. At the time I thought I’d go around the circle a few more times, I’d “figure out where I stood.” Looking back, now, I notice how we looked at the world in lots of different ways. I think about perspectives I’ve heard since, perspectives outside the tradition that class was designed to explore. The manyness—the muchness—is delightful.
                Maybe meaning is less a book on a pedestal, ink on a clear page, and more a whirl of autumn colors above a rich soil full of decaying leaves, and next year’s new leaves asleep, but not asleep forever.