“Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa): Large, heart-shaped leaves [and] Long distinctive seed pods (“big green bean”) […]”
                -Alice Brandon, “Tree & Shrub Identification”

                In the last weeks I’ve started recognizing catalpa trees and purple coneflowers, and now whenever I walk I see them. Bursts of purple blooms grow on the corner near my apartment, and in my friend’s front yard. And in so many fields. Catalpas hang their characteristic “big green beans” like thin magic lanterns over the sidewalk. Each time I see one it’s like saying hello.
                There are a few ways I’ve thought of playing with these moments for a post. For instance, I’ve “meant” to recognize more plants for years, and something funny happened when I stopped “meaning” to and instead saw this burst of purple, this hang of heady green. There’s also something curious about which plants I’m learning: when I was in Oklahoma, I thought, well should I learn these? I won’t be here long. When I got to Illinois I thought the same thing. If I’m going to learn trees, which trees, where?
                Here, I think. I’ve walked underneath a catalpa almost every day. There are purple coneflowers twenty-two steps from where I’m sitting.
                I like those thoughts, but they’re not quite what I want to say. I want to say: look. I want to say that tree has seedpods like tall candles, waiting to be lit, or maybe they’re already lit and they shine photosynthesis and oxygen and saplings instead of candle flames. And they make me grin. And then I want watch them a moment, maybe with you, and say hello.

“When you were a child you made a paper boat and sailed it
on the river shore; the stream flowed gently, and
your boat swayed its way towards the ocean.”
                -Sapardi Djoko Damono, from “Paper Boat” (trans. Hasif Amini & the author)

                When I started writing Uproar, I often felt like I had a contained thought to share. Or at least something resembling a contained thought: I’d read someone’s bright insight, and I wanted to chase it for a paragraph or two. For the last weeks its felt different. Instead of having a specific “something” to say, a what if this or what if that, I find myself more curious (and sometimes overwhelmed) by the wash of all these different somethings coming together.
                Your boat swayed its way towards the ocean.
                That change I’m describing sometimes feels frustrating, but it’s also one of my favorite parts of this project. I’ve been thinking about how I approach myself, how I go closer to my emotions and experiences. I think I often try to “understand” them. If I’ve made a paper boat and set it on the river, then I often try to understand how I folded the boat (and how I might have folded it better), and where in the river to put it (so to catch the current). I try to throw my mind way up above the river, so I can look down and chart the course this boat will take. I try to see the whole picture. In all of that there’s a lot of planning, a lot of directing, a lot of assessing. There’s a lot of attention as a microscope or a telescope, “getting things right,” pinning them down with light.
                The stream flowed gently, and your boat swayed.
                I’ve done that so much that sometimes I’ve started to believe that looking and directing were the only ways to interact with my paper boat. But they aren’t. Reading Damono, I can see the boat and the river for a moment. The little thing I’ve made, and the world around it. If I remember the boat’s on its way toward the ocean, I’m less worried about how many miles that might be. If I’m knee deep in the water, watching the boat sway on the currents, I’m less worried that they’re taking the boat away. Maybe going out can be a kind of coming back. I’ve had that thought before, but watching my paper boat on the river it stops being a thought and becomes a place I stand in for a moment.

“Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.”
                -Khalil Gibran, “On Death”

                Earlier tonight, a friend told me, “It does make me sad sometimes that I don’t seem able to talk about silence. That I can’t say very much about something that’s so important to me.” I asked them if they wanted to spend more time talking about it, and so try to develop language, or if they wanted to embrace silence as a way of knowing apart from words.
                “Both,” they said. We laughed. It’s so often both. We sat outside beneath a string of bistro lights.
                I have been feeling quiet lately. Like sitting with the moment before a leaf falls, fluttering. I’ve also been feeling loud. Talkative. I’m trying to focus on building community. On finding and being part of a web of people who support each other. While staying safe with COVID, I want to make the time and space to meet new friends, invite them out to do things, say yes when I’m invited. I’ve also noticed when I’ve been talking and thought, huh. I’ve thought, that’s not what I meant. I wanted—I want—what do I want? The being together, after so much time apart?
                I love Gibran’s cycles. Singing comes after we’ve drunk from the river of silence. After we sing, I think, we can go back for another drink. Usually, when I feel out of touch with silence, I’ll try to push myself “one way” or “the other.” I try to drown out the silence by listening to something, or else try to enforce it by ordering myself to sit wordless for however long. As though there are only two, and we stand on one side or the other. As though the river has no sound. 

                My friend and I sat beneath a line of bistro lights. They swung a little in the wind, and behind them lay dark sky. In that there was so much—more than two, more than three; as much as a changing current—of what I wanted.

“This the room he painted to cradle the boy he was.
The painter’s step, the sleepers think, is the floor settling.
His breath against their skin, they think a draft or the night’s cold.”
                -Janice Harrington, “Topoanalysis,” in response to Horace Pippin’s painting Asleep 

                Sometimes I think we’re all still children. And toddlers, and infants, I suppose, and adults. Part of me is still knee deep in a pond in the early ‘90s, watching the pollywogs wiggle, swept up in the fullness of life that isn’t mine, and part of me is the child a week later, bored by the polliwogs my parents let me catch. Part of me is the child kneeling by the fishtank sometime after that, wondering how I missed the moment when they got legs. Breathless at their transformation into something familiar and new.
                In “Topoanalysis,” Janice Harrington shows us a painter, Horace Pippin, as he goes back through two world wars (one of which he fought in) and five decades to the room where he was a boy. She lets the painter walk through that room, step on that floor, see that child. She watches Horace Pippin paint a room “to cradle the boy he was.”
                And I realize I’m still so many children. So many kids with skinned knees who can’t explain that it hurts, and kids who feel smothered, and kids who learned too early that hugging isn’t cool. And I’m supported, loved children, too: children snuggled up to hear stories, children exploring the creek, children gathering magic stones. Harrington suggests these places don’t need to stay locked in the past. They aren’t from some other world. Like her painter, we can go there, and cradle the children we are.

                “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.” -Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

                This morning I woke up in Illinois. Most of yesterday I spent traveling across the country, bouncing through flight delays and missed connections. It was the kind of trip that could have been really frustrating, but it wasn’t. When we could fly, I looked out the window at seas of cloud. In the airport, I texted with friends and family. I thought back over the summer that’s gone so quickly.
                By lots of measures, I didn’t do “the work” I had planned for this summer. I didn’t rewrite that much of my book. I didn’t finish my PhD applications for this fall. I did wash a lot of dishes, though. I woke up early and ate an apple while my mom made her tea. I walked with my dad. I stood on the bluffs by the ocean as my younger brother flew his drone out along the cliffs, making me think about them, see them, in ways I never had. I cooked with my older brother. Talked with him. I played a lot with my nieces: we were bears and marmots, dragons and pangolins and witches and family. Le Guin reminds me what I was doing: love. Mixing the dough of it, standing close while it rose. It’s wonderful “work,” my favorite of all the kinds I know. I’m glad for Le Guin reminding me to keep baking so love’s made new. I’m glad for the summer, and so glad for the time with my family.

                “Well, death is normal. It’s not pathological. There is no answer to it. It’s not a problem to solve.” -John Colburn, “The Western Story” (published in Ninth Letter)

                One night, a week ago, I lay in bed and felt pretty sad. And I’d like to sit with that, give myself a chance to feel it, but laying and watching the fog roll in, it was also lovely to let it be. To realize my sadness didn’t need an answer.
                It’s so easy to lash out instead. When I was ten or eleven, my friend and I wrestled for a book we both wanted and ended up tearing the thing in half. The first thing I said was something like, “You did it.” I was sad. Worried. Embarrassed. Books were something you treated with respect, and this one wasn’t mine. I was also angry, and ready to be indignant, as though someone had done this to me. As though this was someone’s fault and something should be done. Then I wouldn’t have to be sitting there, holding half a book, feeling bad. Maybe the book would even be whole.
                At thirteen, when I cut my foot with a crowbar, I didn’t get angry. I’m not sure why. I remember looking at the gash in my skin and thinking, “That’s going to bleed.” A moment later it was. I called my brother and he helped me with bandages. What helped me, right then, to see my hurt and accept it?
                It’s not a problem to solve. One night, a week ago, I lay in bed and felt really sad. That night I also saw a satellite. That night it got cold, even out here in warm California, and I got to burrow into my blankets. The next morning I woke up to my nieces laughing as they went to feed the dog. Lovely, really, and maybe so much of it doesn’t need an answer.

                “Born inside the womb of this warm earth, birthed by rivers older than memory, once realize we knew its name, we knew its rhythms and its corners, we know its leaf skin and the poetry of its language…” -Peter Sipeli in “The Sleeping Ancestors” (a little after minute 8:20)

                “The history of both art and design is a history extracted from the purposes for which the objects were created.” -Luis Camnitzer, One Number Is Worth One Word

                Hearing Sipeli reading for the first time was like standing on the shore, only to realize the waves had already washed up around me, only to realize I was already out at sea, beneath the sea, and I could breathe. It was wonderful. And I realize I’ve had similar experiences before: when running with my nieces or tasting a sip of cold water, when feeling leaves beneath my fingers or frost beneath my feet. I’ve had similar experiences, sometimes, in talking to an old friend or starting to talk with a new one. In hearing poetry. In hearing stories. And other times, I somehow forget these moments happen.
                Camnitzer says that we remove art history from the purposes that inspired the creation of that art. We remove our understanding, our narrative definition, from the lift the seed had in becoming a seedling. So I don’t have a thought today. No explanations. Just a moment, and a question. A moment: last night, lying half asleep outside, I saw a satellite. A bit of metal some humans made and sent up, as though we were trying to touch the stars, as though we were realizing how wide the sky really was. I watched that point of light. A question: today, or in the last few days, what was it that woke up for you? What came from old rivers, what whispered a poetry of language—what did you feel? I’d love to share, or hear.
                The first word in that section of Sipeli’s poem is “Us.” He repeats it. Us, realizing we know these rhythms.

“I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit […]”
                -Ross Gay, from “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”

“This rider of winds, how awkward he is, and weak!
How droll he seems, who lately was all grace!”
                -Charles Baudelaire, from “The Albatross” [trans. Richard Wilbur]

                Seven or eight years ago, while teaching high school, I came up with a pet theory: maybe awkward wasn’t really a thing. Making friends takes emotional effort. Moving through a group, or a romance, takes emotional work. Maybe “awkward” is what we say when we’re afraid we don’t know how to make that effort, or when it feels too hard.
                Last month I helped move some heavy bookshelves out of my brother’s house. Shuffling along, backwards, trying not to scrape the top on the door or the bottom on the floor, my knees and toes knocking into the side, I thought about awkward. Following Baudelaire, maybe awkward is when our messiness shows, our not-good-at-this. We’re so used to trying to broadcast our talent. Understood that way, awkward is a kind of failing: if we had a dolly, or I was better at lifting things, we’d’ve danced those shelves along with grace and aplomb. understood that way, I can try to be better, or else stick to where I “fit.” Up in the sky, the albatross is a “rider of winds.” It’s only down here walking that he looks so weak.
                But then there’s Gay, and his awkward is part of the rush of his gratitude. It’s the silliness of bouncing knees when I’m running or the jumble of knees when I trip, it’s the way I spit (like he spits) when he gets really excited in talking. It’s the goofy ways we grin at each other. It’s not something to be avoided, because the truth is, fumbling along and bouncing into things and trying, I really liked helping to move that bookshelf.

                “I’m still thanking all the stars, one by one.” -Marissa Meyer, Winter

                Somewhere in my early twenties, I started spending a few minutes every day writing a list of what I was grateful for in that moment. I’ve heard it called a gratitude journal. It’s been a couple years since I really continued that practice, but for this next month, I’m going to pick it back up. Here’s my first entry.

                I’m grateful for the cold air that seeped in to the room where I was sleeping, late last night. And for my blanket. I’m grateful for the sound of a dog’s footsteps this morning, quiet and curious in their exploring. I’m grateful for my nieces and all their curiosity, their determination in being themselves, their joy in running. I’m grateful for the breakfast I haven’t eaten yet. 
                I’m grateful to have so much time this summer with my family, and for the friendships that span years, sometimes as thin as threads of I-miss-you and sometimes as thick as forests we wander through. I’m grateful for blowing my nose. It’s so much fun. And then I get to breathe. I’m grateful for dirt beneath my feet and rock beneath the dirt, holding it up into ridges in the nearby park where I’ve been walking, and for roots through the dirt lifting up branches and grass. It’s been hot in California, and I’m really, really grateful for water. I’m grateful for shade. And sun. I’m grateful, when I lift up my eyes, for all the openness between me and what I see, and for the closeness. And in a very real way I’m grateful for you, too. This moment of reaching.

                “[An academic education will] begin to give you an idea what size mind you have.” -Mr. Antolini in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

                “Can I interest you in everything, all of the time?” -Bo Burnham, “The Internet,” Inside

                Lately I’ve been thinking about the size of my thoughts. Sometimes I get trapped going around and around one detail. When I was fifteen and lost my favorite pencil, I’d stomp around the house, somehow sure that I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until I’d found it. Sometimes I get trapped in the largeness of things: in how much is wrong with our education systems, for instance, and the apparent impossibility of trying to help. In bouncing back and forth between magnifying glass thoughts and beyond-the-ocean thoughts, I used to wonder what the “right” scope for me would be. By “right,” I guess I meant the one that would help me understand more. And the one that would feel better. Did I need a wider lens? Or a narrower one?
                In the last few weeks, instead of looking for the “right” one, I’ve been paying attention to where I feel drawn in different moments. Sometimes I want to zoom in. A jeweler once told me how, when he stared through his magnifying lenses, the little space of a ring became a whole world he could step into. I’ve felt that kind of engagement. It’s lovely. I fall in: to one sensation, one leaf, one line of poetry. Other times I lie on my back, looking up at the sky, and the sense of all this going on and on carries me out with it. It’s breathtaking. If the real threat in Burnham’s line is the last part, “all of the time,” then I can always ask about now. When the field’s too big, I can pick a little patch of grass, a sip of shade, to sit in. When that’s too small I can walk or look up.
                Can I hear where you’re looking, just for right now?