“Before we crash
I reach over
and place my right arm
against Grandmother’s chest

the very moment

she reaches over
to me.”
                -Janet S. Wong, Behind the Wheel

                I keep coming back to that moment: a woman reaching out to protect her grandmother, a woman reaching back to protect her granddaughter.
                There are so many people who need help. Taking care of children shows that: little humans totter along wonderfully, but my niece would totter in dangerous directions without anyone else nearby, and she doesn’t pack her own snacks. Paying attention to my heart shows that: I used to have this American individualist idea that I should be able to sit alone and Be Great, but that never worked out. Whatever’s strong in me is a response to those around me. Looking around shows that: I keep seeing people who so obviously need a hand reaching out to them. I find myself wondering, so who?
                If you squint at human history, maybe it starts looking like experiments with that question: who gets support, who offers it, and how is it given? Are kids raised by parents, or governesses, or the community? Are grandparents taken care of by paid professionals (if the grandparents can pay), or by their children, or by the community? The apples from that tree—who gets them? Angeles Arrien comments somewhere that healthy adults will be fine in most societies, so the measure of a society is how its people takes care of those who aren’t healthy adults.
                All this can get pretty transactional: the school counselor is responsible for this group, but not that one. My professors can choose to help me, but should not ask for help from me. I’m socially bound to help my housemate with the sink, but not with his tears. Those rules are set up for a reason, or at least for different reasons: so the people make the rules get as much as possible, so we don’t have to be uncomfortable about asking for or offering support, or so support is offered fairly and equally and safely. Some of those rules have their place. Adults take care of kids because kids need it. Kids grow up and take care of others, because then it’s their turn. Lives have stages, and if we get the gears right, maybe all these lives can fit together, tic tic, like a good clock.
                All the same, I keep going back to Wong’s image. If we need rules to make sure that everyone is offered support, maybe we need poems to remind us how offering that support could feel. A woman reaches out to her grandmother. A woman reaches out to her granddaughter. Someone’s just coming into their time of leading, of taking care of the garden we share. Someone’s been leading for a long time, and her hands are probably tireder than once they were. They protect each other, or support each other, or share the wish of support with each other. It’s not a trade or a transaction. It’s not taking turns. It’s vulnerable and tender. Perhaps we could call that kind of support love, and living.

                “Of course, the point at which I began to write the story is not the same as the point at which the story begins. You can’t live and write at the same time.” 
                -Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?

                Well, certainly—and yet I do seem to try to, don’t I? 
                I recently came back from a visit to my family in California. There are plenty of things that’re oof about living 2,000 miles from people you love, but there are things that’re helpful, too: for instance, when I visit and then have to go, there’s a shortened time frame in which I’m reminded to reach out. Living close to someone, I can get caught up in the idea that there’ll be time—more time, and more time—to be there, to say the things I want to say, to listen and make space and stay in it. Having to go reminds me, now.
                That timeframe can be a good push forward. It can also be a distraction. If I’m sitting on the couch, thinking I really want to be connecting right now, I’m not connecting. I suppose one ideal might be to let the push move me forward, and then let being there take over; right now I’m looking at the example of trying to do two contradictory things at the same time. Bechdel can’t write about her relationship with her mother and live her relationship with her mother at the same time. The second (usually, at least?) is back-stepping, it’s an attempt at sense-making; the first is just making, or being. It doesn’t have a pen in its hand. In the same way, though you can move from one to the other, I’m not sure wanting to be available to connect is the same as being there with someone.
                On New Year’s Day we went to the beach, toes in sand and a cold wind blowing, and jumped into the Pacific. Like I was fourteen again, I spent a long time (I’ve no idea how long, really) building a big windbreak for our group to sit behind. It worked pretty well. There are so many wonderful things about wet sand, but the one I’m following here is what it’s like to build with. I needed stuff for my sand wall. I could pick it up in handfuls, or push it over, but I needed to pile up lots of sand, messy and flying, somehow in my smiling teeth, somehow in my hair. Then I needed to pat it down, shape it, compress it so it stayed in place. Maybe some master sand-castler will one day tell me a simpler way, but conceptually, I like those two stages: the moving, and the firming up. The coming together, and the settling. The collecting, and the shaping. Sometimes I try to collapse them all into one step, I try to create and understand all at once, to raise and pat down in one motion, but it doesn’t work very well. Of course it doesn’t. You can’t live and write at the same time.

                “Creation, according to Dora-Rouge, was an ongoing thing.” -Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

                Sometimes I’m tempted to “finish,” to add the last piece, and brush my hands, and move on. I want to do something drastic, final, and get to the end already. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I like puzzles, and find a missing piece so frustrating. I want to finish, and I can’t.
                One day last semester, when I came into work, I ran into a friend who was having a hard time. There were plenty of reasons why. We talked about some of them, sitting at our desks, the morning light changing and the electric lights holding steady. After a little while, I noticed that in talking I was looking for a narrative or a solution that would make the hurt go away, or else “use it” somehow. He’s a writer, and I was trying to help him “get through this” or “use this” and “get back to writing.” Make this useful. Make it move. Move on. That’s a worldview I fall into a lot, a worldview of finishing and putting on the shelf, of earning trophies (like stuffing moose heads) and fixing them on the wall to never touch again. Sometimes I want to do something to show I’ve done something. To prove something. To create, and understand, and have it set.
                Of course, my friend’s a person as well as a writer, and a friend, and a son, and a dude in a beanie, and lots of other things. I don’t think he’ll do something that proves he’s worthwhile; I don’t think he needs to. He isn’t a finished product: when I try to think what he is, I stumble more toward verbs than nouns. A runner? Maybe, but certainly someone who runs, down streets and under trees, leaving behind and finding. A writer? Okay—but more so someone who writes, who listens, who wonders, who slips through doors I didn’t see because they didn’t quite exist until he reached out and opened them. And opening changes them. And walking through changes them. And they’ll keep changing, these doors he opens, these moments he feels, these paths he walks.
                Instead of talking about how to deal with his grief, about freewriting or sharing or sitting under a tree, we ended up just talking about the grief. We ended up standing in it, and once we did, we found other things, too. Some fears. Some hopes. Or maybe, more clearly, we hoped, we feared, we cared, we reached and rested. The day pulled us along, and we pulled it, and all that was ongoing.

                “When we return to our breathing, we return to the present moment, our true home. There’s no need for us to struggle to arrive somewhere else. We know our final destination is the cemetery. Why are we in a hurry to get there? Why not step in the direction of life, which is in the present moment?”
                “When you walk, arrive with every step.”
                –Thích Nhất Hạnh, How To Walk

                Sometimes we find important thoughts in silly packages. For instance, remember that saying about how every moment is a gift, and that’s why it’s called the present? Silliness, kitsch, yes, yes. But also: I was sitting the other night, paying attention to my breathing, and for a moment each breath was something like a beautiful surprise.
                When I started sitting for a little while every day, I was measuring my time. Seven minutes: I set an alarm on my phone. Then I started sitting until I wasn’t worried about how long I would sit for. Then, one night, I remembered Thích Nhất Hạnh’s comment that  meditation isn’t something that takes a long time. It isn’t something that requires fanfare and distinction. It’s something he does standing in line at the supermarket, or while walking, or in between one breath and the next. I’d thought about that before, but thinking and doing are different.
                For me, doing that—or what might have been that—felt like a kind of waiting. A slight, expectant pause between one now and another, between inhaling and exhaling. It was a pause in which I realized something was happening. It felt like—well, I could come up with an elaborate story: I could say it felt like putting my face into an ocean, holding my breath, for a moment, and seeing the sparkling fish and growing kelp; like realizing I could breath there; like breathing out, and falling forward to someplace that was both new and home. But that’s too much of a story. I once told a meditation teacher I was visualizing my breath as a glowing ball of energy that moved up and down in my chest. I thought I was doing a great job. They smiled: “There’s a difference between the idea of the breath and the breath,” they said. “Go back to the breath.”
                Back to the breath. Back to the present moment. Stories are wonderful, but they aren’t now. In the few weeks since I started writing this post, I’ve been worried about trying to repeat the experience. It felt so sweet, so easy; what if I couldn’t go back? And of course, I can’t go back. And of course, the sweet moment didn’t happen without the plodding hopeful preparation of practice. (I wonder how many hours Thích Nhất Hạnh spent meditating before he did it in a moment). But it did happen that one night, and in the last few days, something similar has happened in new, different ways. Sitting in the dark or the light, outside or in my room—sitting here, wanting to laugh and listen, and to see what happens next—what is now—all this feels, sometimes, like arriving with every step.

“I wish I could travel by the road that crosses baby’s mind, and out beyond all bounds;
[…] Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them…”
                -Rabindranath Tagore, “Baby’s World”

                Dr. Gordon Neufeld talks about the ‘emergent process,’ the stage of human development in which someone’s interest and intent reaches out to meet the world. It’s this process that brings a child to ‘me do it’ and an adult to ‘this matters to me.’ I’ve usually imagined it as a spring, bubbling up from somewhere inside.
                A few nights ago, my fourteen-month-old niece took me for a walk. Inside by the sliding glass door, she kept pointing out into the dark. She walks but she likes to be carried, too, and she’ll point and make sounds to show what she wants. When I put on her coat and carried her out, she wanted to go to the hottub, and stick in her feet, and splash. Then she wanted to go back toward the house. Something ran through the bushes, and she wanted to stand among the trees and listen for whatever it had been. She wanted to stick her feet into the cold water of the fountain, not splashing this time, and then go across the street to a neighbor’s holiday lights. She touched the lights, one by one, the colorful ones and the white ones, walking by herself back and forth between two bushes and a tree.
                It was wonderful, for me, to go with her and follow where she led. I wish I could travel by the road that crosses a baby’s mind. It was wonderful to see how curious she was about the world. The fountain is 49° (I checked, later), but she put her feet in three times, stopping between each to feel the water on her toes. She stopped on the sidewalk, slipping down to hands and knees to explore the stark shadow painted by a streetlamp above her. When deer ran by, she wanted to go over to them, but they were much faster than we were. I said, “Bye, deer,” and she stayed there on the street, watching where they had gone, watching me, and every now and then saying with happy, quiet certainty, 
                “Buh.”
                Bye, I think.
                I think I’d missed, until that walk, how much the emergent process is about meeting the world. It’s not just upwelling me: it’s me coming out to touch what’s there. The water, the cement, the lights.
                Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them. Reason and thinking through and discovering, all those are good. I would do some research to make a kite that worked, and some of the materials I needed and the laws I followed would be rigid. But they wouldn’t be the end in themselves. A kite, once its flying, lifts up from making hands to rest on the sky’s changing currents. Perhaps the laws are for lifting. Perhaps me is really me meeting.

                “The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”
                -Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

                I’ve loved Campbell’s image for a long time: the little, neat house of what I call my consciousness, where I putter around and work and wash the dishes, and (I imagine) the stairs that lead to a raw stone tunnel that opens to caverns and fissures and mists and dancing lights. Until more recently, I’d forgotten the next line, where Campbell says that the spirits there are those we have not integrated into our lives. So what if we did some integrating?
                When I was younger I loved swimming in the ocean, but it also scared me, sometimes. I’d seen some of those old, hokey, plastic-figure-comes-out-of-the-ocean horror movies, and sometimes when I swam I imagined tentacles unfolding toward me from the depths I couldn’t see. And I loved swimming. At midnight on New Years’ Eve, my family would sometimes go jump into the cold Northern California waves. I loved it. I came out smiling, laughing, heart racing—and it wasn’t despite what I felt of the unknown of the ocean. It was, in part, in line with it. I’d just gone down a little into the caverns. Cold water often helped me do that, when I was young: when, at 12, maybe, my family walked through several feet of snow to jump into Lake Tahoe, we weren’t jumping into it because it was comfortable. We were jumping into it for the shock and surprise, for the close touch of winter; for the mirror world, just on the other side of the dark surface, that broke apart to meet us.
                I think crying helps me do the same thing. It helps me integrate the ‘psychological power’ of a great hurt or confusion that otherwise I can’t get close to. I know howling into the night sky does, too. I should howl more. I usually think of my mind as a loose, unruly group of different speakers: this one’s hollering, “Stay in bed!” and that one would rather “Drop everything and move to somewhere else!” and of course there’s the one who’s saying, “Move,” and will say it louder—”Move, move for the sake of it, run!”—the longer I ignore him. Maybe psychological beasties who come fighting up into my meeting hall are the mes (the Grendels) who weren’t already allowed in. Maybe, if they’re brought in as members and not as invaders, they’ll eat some lentils and sit by the fire and shout their shouts, and join in all our wonderings and compromises.
                Either way, I think there’s something fun in spelunking through the caves. When I was a kid I went down into the earth with my best friend and his parents. Three quarters of the way through our forty minute tussle underground, I was belly button deep in mud (mostly, I think, because I’d gone someplace the guide told us not to; my friend and I had also swum across the underground lake, instead of waiting for the guide to show us where her company had stashed boats). I went in to feel the mud, pulling at me, and it pulled off my shoe. I lost something, of course, and after hunting around for a while, walked out with one bare foot. But the mud that pulled off my shoe was part of the ground I stood on, too.

                “…I listen to what has made it to the page. Invariably, things have arrived that I did not invite, and they are often the most interesting things in the story. By refusing to fully know the world, I hope to discover unusual formations in the landscape, and strange desires in the characters. By declining to analyze the story, I hope to keep it open to surprise. […] What I can see is always dwarfed by what I cannot know.”
                -Robert Boswell, “The Half-Known World”

                Knowing’s a bit of a fool’s game, isn’t it? It’s predicated on the predictable: that tomorrow will be like today, or that it will change according to today’s rules. Which is, largely, true: in a Philosophy class we talked about how momentous it is to realize that the same physical laws that govern our daily lives are at work in the stars. But oh, those stars. Every time I lay on my back and look at them, or at an ant, or an air conditioner, I’m faced (if I choose to be; if I let myself be) by a mystery—a half-known world, says Robert Boswell. Feynman, that great knowing unknowner, remarks somewhere that any question (why does a ball bounce?) followed carefully leads out past the edge of what anyone understands. That doesn’t mean we don’t know anything: we do, and we can use that. But knowing’s a fool’s game, definitionally incomplete. To put it differently, in a Shakespeare play it’s the Fool—the unknower—who might be able to touch the complexity of what’s going. 
                Boswell is talking specifically about how to write fiction. We should stop laundry listing characteristics, he says. Stop controlling it all, understanding it all, arranging it beforehand. “A crucial part of the writing endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark.” I’d like to teach from this, too: any time I come to a class from the perspective of my certainty, of my knowing how to see or (even worse) knowing how to “handle” the people in front of me, it all comes tumbling down. Instead I try to remember that I have things to share, and that I’m in the dark about which of those I’ll add (and how I’ll add them) to what’s discovered. 
                I’d also like to live from unknowing, I think. I knew I wouldn’t be an English major. (Cue Avenue Q: “What do you do…”). I knew I wanted to go to grad school after only a year or two of working. I knew that I wouldn’t like indoor rock climbing as much as outdoor climbing, and I knew that I only wanted to stay in Oklahoma for a year or two. Of course, none of those were true. Sometimes I know how to do everything in front of me, and then I make a hash of things, and sometimes I know I can’t do any of it, and then someone helps me get over myself, or I go to sleep; eventually, I find my way to a maybe, a mystery, a what-if or what-else or well,-there’s-this. 
                Knowing brings me back to my expectations, back to the little pile of firewood I’ve managed to gather from the forest. That firewood’s good for keeping me warm. But it’s half knowing, I think, that brings me to the woods.

                “Someone asks what time it is. I’m the first to answer. Or at the ballpark when the vendor comes. He passes the hot dog down the long row. I want my hands on it, too.”
                -Stanley Elkin, “A Poetics for Bullies”

                For the last little while my students had been talking about how hard it felt to find a way to help, given all the old, complicated hurts they saw, and then one student said: “Hang on. If I had a—a nonprofit, whatever—that helped feed people, and you knew my program was doing something, how many of you would come do some work with me?”
                There was a little pause, and then everyone held up their hand.
                I think everyone I’ve ever met has a fundamental desire to help. That might not be the only want they had: they wanted cheetos, too, maybe, and to be the best, but also to have their hands on the work of supporting someone else. Elkin’s story shows this want from its shadow side: his narrator, “Push the bully,” goes around pushing people he doesn’t know how to help. But he wants to be asked the time, and to answer. He wants to pass along a hotdog to someone hungry. 
                Maybe one of the reasons I like backpacking is that it makes this work tangible and apparent. There isn’t a place for all of us to sleep, and then someone pitches a tent. We’re thirsty, and someone pumps water from the creek. Our packs our heavy, but in them there’s food for us to eat and clothes to keep us warm. If everyone only carried their own gear, their own food, their own tent, I don’t think I’d like it half as much. 
                The trick is to take that obvious reminder and bring it back from the mountains. Sometimes that’s easier than others: at my house dishes can sit in the sink until even the ceramic starts to rust somehow, but at yours I kinda like washing the dishes. I hate keeping up with my car’s maintenance, and we should all invest in a different transportation system, but changing a tire (or even the brake pads) with you is pretty neat. I don’t quite know how, but learning feels easier as we work it through together. That’s partly because the work itself is shared and more enjoyable; all the same, if I had to figure out how to change the brake pads, alone, I’d have an easier time if it were to support you than just because I had to. That part might be me. But the larger part,  the wish to have your hands on the work of helping—that’s everyone I’ve ever met.

                “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
                “We can never go back […] But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back…”
                –Rebecca (1940)

                I had that line in my head for most of last night. My life isn’t very Hitchcockian, no murders or hidden identities—except, I suppose, those most of us have—so it isn’t that. I have been wondering about time and place, though. Last weekend I talked to friends in Oklahoma, and thought about the woods they live near, the woods I used to live near, and the way the rain filled the forest with puddles and reflections. A few days before that I heard from a friend in California, and remembered growing close as we walked along a creek; a few days before that, I talked to a friend from my time in India. I haven’t seen Rebecca since I was a kid, and when I watched it, I suppose the death and intrigue mostly missed me. But I was caught by the opening line. I felt, somehow, that sooner or later it would make sense, that there would be places I dreamt of going back to, and couldn’t go back to, and would go back to in my dreams all the same.
                There are a dozen places I’d like to live so that I could be nearer to the people I’ve grown close to. Even with moving, as so much art explores, I probably can’t go back so much as go again in a different away. All the same, when I was leaving India, and hurting at the thought of leaving the people around me, an elder told me: “You carry them all with you.” It’s a simple thought, the kind I’ve heard many times before, the kind that probably doesn’t work as clickbait. And the version of people I can carry is not the version I want, not the present companions I remember. Still, though: sometimes I feel them here. Maybe Oklahoma and California and India and Massachusetts, maybe home and valley and creek and field and hill and cave, maybe they’re all here, at least a little, at least in one way. Or maybe being here and being there and being aren’t nearly as simple, as consistent, as I so often pretend. There are so many places I’ve been that I dream of going, and can’t go to, and still, in my dreams, go back to all the same.

“i’m just going to sit here past late
the stars don’t care at what cost
you breathe while i whisper a song
‘this accident of being lost’”
                -Leanne Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost

                Lately I’ve been working at getting lost. Which is probably the problem, and shows the silliness of all my self-important determination.
                It’s not street-lost I want. I could probably do that. I could wander down some roads, have a friend drop me off somewhere, find my way back. But returning to this particular house isn’t the “coming back” I’m looking for, so that’s not the “lost” I mean. I mean—I mean lying down in a field, and not moving, because for a moment—with the swaying grass, and the beetles, and the clouds—I’ve forgotten how.
                A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to explain poetry. She studies plant physiology, and hopes to help explain to the public what climate change is doing and will do to the landscapes around us. So I told her, ‘When you’re talking to a group and they just don’t see the prairie, even though it’s right there, then maybe you could read them a poem.’ She said that made sense, but when I pushed it, when I told her a poem can help me step outside and get lost in the garden (she’s a big gardener), she said,
                “But that happens.”
                “It does?” I asked, because somehow, focused on my explanation, that surprised me.
                “Yeah,” she said. “Especially if I’m planting. Or cleaning up leaves.”
                Later, when I told her I was writing this, she laughed and asked if it would screw up my blog to admit that she’d been thinking about it, and that she “liked poetry,” she “thought it was probably a good lens to seem some specific part of all this beauty.” I told her it wouldn’t. But I’ve been thinking, too, and I’ve realized I was working at getting lost. You don’t work at the ocean holding you. You step into the ocean, and it does. I was working, trying, instead of letting myself be lost. It’s an accident, says Simpson, and in her book she also seems to say that being lost is the door we step through, or maybe, better, the ground we grow in, so that one day we might be found. It’s the place we start. As long as I’m walking the paths I know, expecting and sure of where I’m going, I won’t find my way to—what? Another? Myself? The world?
                Who knows. I’m not sure there are words for it. It’s probably more a thing of silences, like the wind across the stones or the footsteps of the rain when you look up and realize, oh, here I am. Here I am I don’t know where. Instead of trying to follow my trail or blunder off it, I’m trying to sit here, to realize that I’m already, on accident, finally, fully, lovingly l—