“Contemplating the lace-like fabric of streams outspread over the mountains, we are reminded that everything is flowing–going somewhere, animals and so-called lifeless rocks as well as water. […] the stars go streaming through space pulsed on and on forever like blood globules in Nature’s warm heart.”
                -John Muir, My First Summer In The Sierra

                About three years ago, for the first time since I was six or seven, I started having trouble sleeping. I wasn’t (and I’m not) sure why. I lay awake, worried about not being rested, angry at not being asleep, and then I lay awake some more because I was angry and worried. I closed my eyes (or covered them with a pillow) and told myself: lie still! Be asleep! It didn’t help that much. After about a month, the sleeplessness slipped off without explaining itself. I still slept with the blinds closed and a t-shirt over my eyes, because that had become my habit. Otherwise things went back to normal. A new normal, I suppose.
                This weekend I slept outside. It got down to 33 degrees, I think, and it was windy, so the tip of my nose and the top of my head were cold as I fell asleep. I put down my sleeping pad on a slopey part of the backyard, because that’s where I was most hidden from my various neighbors’ lights. I woke up every now and then, to the wind chime that kept ringing, to the cold hand of the wind, to a possum (I think), to sliding off my pad. And I slept wonderfully. The stars were bright and the trees were whispering. When I woke up, I was aware of them for a moment, happy with them, and then I was asleep again.
                I think I fell into the habit of looking for peace by covering my eyes, by insisting there be no light around me, no outside sound. That’s one way to look for peace. But I think I found more when I decided to stop fighting against all those outside shifting whispers, when I went out from my house, got my toes cold in the grass, and lay down to listen (and yawn) with a smile. When we’re young, we’re not rocked to sleep by stillness. There’s so much flowing around me, through me, over me. I can look for peace by shutting my eyes to the movement. I can look for peace by being part of the current.

“May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home

                This morning I skipped breakfast–I told myself I was in a hurry–went to a meeting, taught a class, and sat at my desk to make some ramen. Just as I started the noodles a student came by: a thoughtful, playful young man who wanted to talk about communicating and scuba diving. He mentioned an old teacher who used to make tea, and I thought, aha!, I used to make students tea. Why did I stop? I got some more water, and invited him to sit down.
                In my life, at least, tea is largely a reminder to sit quietly for a little while, to watch the interplay of leaves and water, to taste the subtle changes. I had a good tea drinking habit going for almost a year, and then, in all the hurly burly, I started thinking I didn’t have time. Perhaps the truth is I didn’t have time not to make a cup of tea, because in the months I hurly-burlied straight through the morning, the hurly-burly got to me. (That’s dangerous. Remember Macbeth?). But someone asking me to talk about something that matters–well, I’m foolish, but that’s one way to pull me right out of my foolishness. So, for the first time in a long time, I made some tea.
                We talked.
                We listened.
                It was nice, and then I found myself in the curious position of having a bowl of chicken ramen next to a teacup of excellent jasmine green tea. I had a bite of one, a sip of the other. And then my student and I realized we had to talk about this strange combination. It was, I think, symbolic of my life, and my culture, and my failings, and maybe of other things that are perhaps yours as well as mine.
                Ramen gets its punch by being very. Very salty, very easy, very cheap, very everything it is. Jasmine green tea, on the other hand, is all about shades fading into one another. The clear of the water slipping toward the soft glow of the tea. Ramen is so very that it reaches out and grabs my attention, even when I think I’m in a hurry. There’s always time for ramen. But when I sit, for a moment, with a friend, tea reminds me that there is enough world and enough time to sit with the quiet, steady growth of a leaf in water.
                Maybe I’ve been holding too many of the words I know, instead of tasting the shape of strange ones. Maybe I’ve been eating too often, instead of smelling the food I’m helping to cook. I want to eat less ramen, and drink more tea.

“Scoop: You want other things in life than I do
Heidi: Really? Like what?
Scoop: Self-fulfillment. Self-determination. Self-exaggeration.
Heidi: That’s exactly what I want.
Scoop: Right. Then you’d be competing with me.”
                -Wendy Wasserstein, The Heidi Chronicles

“In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others.”
                -Nelson Mandela

                Perhaps competition is often a silly system. That’s a big claim. I’m making it.
                Neil Simon has a scene (adapted from Chekhov) in which two old men argue over what would make the best lunch. In a quick tangent, one of these Russians describes picking up a newspaper and finding “only good news:” “France is having political trouble, they’re starving in Ireland, England is in a financial crisis…but here everything is good.” Competition is supposed to bring out the best in us: it’s supposed to inspire us towards new heights and new ideas. More often, as far as I can tell, at least the way we do it today, it just makes us wish for and delight in other people’s failings. It makes us defensive, and scared for ourselves, and mean. It makes us cheer as a player from the other team gets hit really hard, and maybe hurt; it makes us think more about winning than about what we’re doing. It makes us glad that they’re starving in Ireland.
                If I’m not careful, Wassterstain reminds us, then your self-fulfillment seems to threaten mine. ‘There’s only so much power and wealth and control to go around, and it’s mine,’ says a greedy desperate brat inside. If I follow that voice, I lose, or I end up the king of an empty world. If my idea of living well involves living in a world with other people–if I imagine myself with parents and siblings and lovers and friends–then the competition really isn’t there. Heidi understands that, I think. Scoop can’t see it. We build our competitions, but before them, within them, there’s cooperation. There’s ubuntu, and I am–I am alive, I am fulfilled, I am here–because we are. I don’t want a kind of self fulfillment that puts you on the sidelines. I want a kind of fulfillment that celebrates you and the world as much as it celebrates me. Look around. I want a kind of fulfillment as full as all that.

                “I have ventured to place before India the ancient law of self-sacrifice. For satyagraha and its off-shoots, non-co-operation and civil resistance are nothing but new names for the law of suffering.
                The rishis, who discovered the law of non-violence in the midst of violence, were greater geniuses than Newton. They were themselves greater warriors than Wellington. Having themselves known the use of arms, they realized their uselessness, and taught a weary world that its salvation lay not through violence but through non-violence.
                Non-violence in its dynamic condition means conscious suffering. It does not mean meek submission of the will of the evildoer, but it means putting of one’s whole soul against the will of the tyrant. Working under this law of our being, it is possible for a single individual to defy the whole might of an unjust empire to save his honor, his religion, his soul, and lay the foundation for that empire’s fall or its regeneration.”
                -Mahatma Gandhi, Young India

                Well, we talked about fear last week. Let’s talk about tears. Tonight, while I was talking to someone I love, they said, “You sound like you’re soldiering on with sadness in your heart. We don’t need to talk about that, but I want to recognize it.” And I thought, “Yes. I am.” And I hadn’t really known that I was. I thought I was stressed at the work in front of me. I thought, because I’m often pretty silly, that my stomach was hurting after dinner. But it wasn’t my stomach, not really.
                There’s a scene in Firefly that keeps coming back to me. Shepherd Book, a kind of futuristic monk, has fallen in with a crew of noble outlaws. (“I call him religious who understands the suffering of others,” writes Gandhi). Book has tried, in whatever fumbling ways he can, to share his insight and courage; he’s also felt a world more complicated and confusing than the simple, black and white teachings he learned in the abbey. He’s hurt someone. He’s seen someone killed. Book tells another traveler, “I believe I’m just…I think I’m on the wrong ship.”
                “Maybe,” his new friend says. “But maybe you’re exactly where you ought to be.”
                Back at Amherst, Professor Mehta once told me that Gandhi was the most radical thinker he’d ever studied. In explaining why the little, smiling man was so different from the other voices around me, Mehta eventually said: “Gandhi believes in suffering. He believes in it as part of life, and not just as something to be avoided.” I listened, and didn’t understand. Now I think back to Shepherd Book. I read a little more Gandhi.
                Suffering hurts. That’s what it does. But I inflict a second wound on myself when I think that the pain is wrong, that I am wrong for feeling it; that it shouldn’t be this way. I don’t need that second wound. I don’t need to tell myself that I’m on the wrong ship because this ship has shaken me, because what I see frightens me, because there is sorrow in my heart; this is my world, and this is where I belong. And sadness–suffering–self-sacrifice–is a nurturing part of my world. Part of me has known that ever since my friend died, and I went on, still loving him, sometimes laughing with the memory of him, sometimes crying. The hurt of losing is part of the seeds he gave me. The sorrow is part of the joy. It’s all one, and I’ll keep it. Part of me knows that every time I see people hurting each other, or themselves, and choose to care. That hurts. Love has its tears. But this is my love, my ship. Once I stop telling myself that the pain means I’ve somehow chosen wrong, I stop cutting the wound deeper. Once I recognize Gandhi’s ancient law of honor, of non-violence, of self-sacrifice, I’m free to learn (as he tells me I must learn) how to bleed. And the truth is, for love, for this, when it is needed, I don’t mind bleeding.
                “Maybe you’re exactly where you ought to be.”

                “I’m terrified of my eyes liquifying and running down my cheeks like two great tears.”
                -Neil Gaiman.

                “I wish I wasn’t afraid all the time…but I am.” -Evey, V For Vendetta

                When I heard Neil Gaiman speak in Tulsa, someone asked him, “You write such frightening stuff–does anything actually scare you?”
                “So many things scare me,” said Gaiman. He gave a few examples. And then: “I’m terrified of my eyes liquifying and running down my cheeks like two great tears.”
                Most of the time, I interact with fear as either a kind of mental misstep (“Don’t be afraid; you’ll make new friends”) or as an indicator that I should do something, now, against whatever I’m afraid of (“That’s a wasp! Kill it!”). In both cases, my interaction is about ending the fear. About making it go away. Thinking back to Gaiman, smiling, and, if he’s to be believed, often afraid, I realized there’s another option. I could accept that fear sits here sometimes. I could decide that’s okay, and make room for it on the bench.
                In V for Vendetta, the hero, V, tortures Evey until she’s ready to calmly choose death over cooperation with an oppressive government. In the moment that she does, V says, “You have no fear anymore. You’re completely free.” The image, here, is of fear as a cage from which we must escape. What if V has mistaken the problem? What if Evey’s struggle doesn’t come from the fact of her fear, but from its prevalence? What if our fear is not a cage to be broken, but a frost on the lake–a frost that makes me shiver, that suggests I move, that reminds me to pay attention? A frost that’s just a part of things?
                When I was younger, on a kayaking trip, I paddled out ahead of my group. The river swept me around a bend, so it looked like I was all alone. Below me was an adult bear in the water. I was frightened. I started back paddling as the current pushed me forward. The bear clambered up on the bank, looked back at me, and disappeared. I didn’t know what to say when the adults caught up with me. I was still afraid. I also felt lucky. I felt awe.
                Maybe my fears are the bears–better yet, the jaguars–in the forest of my mind, ferocious, sleek, sometimes slipping quietly in the shadows and sometimes roaring. Maybe I can listen to them, be careful of them, learn from them, or stand quietly as they go by. The next time I’m afraid, I don’t want to set up a hunting party. I don’t want to assume that being afraid (or being sad; tears, says Gaiman) is some kind of character flaw. “I’m afraid,” I could tell myself. “And that’s okay. That’s one of the things that’s here. What’s it doing? What else is here? And what now?”

                “The only thing she always knew she wanted was love, was Derek, was her boys, but then even that went wrong, and she didn’t want anything at all. And so she began to feel as though there was no want, there was no you.
                What do you want?”
                -J. Robert Lennon, Familiar

                It’s hard for me to figure out how to want. I certainly have wants: today, when I got home, I wanted to sit down and nothing. That’s often what I want at the end of a work day. Sometimes that’s what I do, and sometimes the nothing turns into an hour, or two. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with resting, but I don’t feel rested at the end of the two hours. That happens with a lot of my wants: they lead me toward places I don’t want to go, they conflict with other wants, or they don’t even get to the thing they’re after.
                Maybe the problem is that my nothing isn’t really nothing: like many Americans, it’s the static of screens and entertainment, the muddied mumble of webpages, TV, changing light and catchy sound. If what I really want is to rest, to find a place of quiet inside my body and my head, then all that stimulus isn’t the right road to walk.
                Thinking about my wants seems useful. It’s a way to try to understand, to weigh them against each other, to choose. At the same time, I don’t want to be some martinet, forcing each song to quietly raise its hand before it sings. Where’s the place for dancing? On the other hand, many of my wants really do seem like poor guides. If a cool looking dog kept leading you into a swamp burping with foul gas, you wouldn’t keep following the dog. What do I do when I am the dog? And the swamp? And the person deciding whether or not I’ll follow along?
                Sometimes I think there’s something important in the fire of want. It certainly gives you a nice little shove. It might be an ingredient in the paint that gives things color. Sometimes I think letting go of my wants lets me see the rich color that already exists all around me, swirling through the world. Sometimes I watch myself sleepwalking along, “wanting” the things I’ve been told I should want. Sometimes a passion comes like sunrise, and I look away. Sometimes I warm myself. Most of the time, I’m confused.
                Today, instead of sitting down after work, I chopped some veggies for dinner. I felt the knife rock back and forth across the cutting board. (“Chop wood, carry water,” my mother would say; maybe that means take the step you can, or focus on some work in the world). I didn’t really want to, at least, not when I started chopping. By the end I was smiling. Had I disciplined my wants, or followed them, or understood them?
                “What do you want?”
                Do other people have an easy time answering that question? And how important is that question, compared, for instance, to ‘What does the world need?’

                In Quack This Way, Bryan Garner asks what David Foster Wallace thinks about “officialese,” the strange, formal language that airport officials use when they say “Keep your personal belongings in visual contact at all times,” instead of something like “Please keep an eye on your stuff.” DFW says that, as a language guy, that kind of phrasing used to make him mad. These days he has a different first response:
                “There are reasons behind this stuff. Very complicated reasons. I’m not sure they’re good reasons or not, but there are reasons.”

                I copied out this quote, and then I lay on my bed (and my floor, and the deck out back) for three hours, writing and rewriting and scrapping pages of text in response to David Foster Wallace. I couldn’t say it quite right. I couldn’t even decide what the “it” was I was trying to say. Then I went for a walk. There was a reason I lay on my bed for hours, struggling with my keyboard–DFW’s simple statement was a treasure chest, and I wanted something from inside. There’s a reason I didn’t get where I was going–I was frustrated, and lazy, fumbling my way through muddied concepts. There’s a reason why going outside made things clearer: I’ve read human brains perk up when we see nature moving, and whether that’s true or not, I like the taste of the trees, the touch of the wind, the dance of the ground. There’s a reason I’m okay with spilling out pages of splintered junk as I try to follow an idea: sometimes I’m too quick to quit, and holding myself to the task is important.
                When I look at something and it bothers me, or it’s incomprehensible, or it just seems stupid, there’s probably a reason behind it. There’s probably a reason why someone built the thing that way, or goes about doing the thing that way. (In the airport case, DFW suggests the loudspeaker wants to sound like the voice of abstract authority, so that we quietly go along with what it says while feeling both controlled and protected). The reasons are complicated. They might not be very good. All the same, they’re there. If I don’t understand them, or at least consider them, I might have a hard time changing what’s in front of me. I might be surprised when people resist the changes I suggest. I might create solutions that don’t take into account the entire situation.
                The next time I’m doing something that seems stupid, or lazy–the next time I see someone else doing something that just drives me crazy–I’m probably going to say “that’s dumb!” It’s my habit, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to escape from it immediately. But a second later I’m going to remember DFW and say, “Wait a minute. What are the reasons behind this stuff?”

a flute can
be made of a man
nothing is explained
a flute lays
on its side
and prays a wind
might enter it
and make of it
at least
a small final song
                -Ross Gay, “ode to the flute,” Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude

                I used to think that life was about becoming something, about building my fire higher, shining my thoughts brighter. What if, instead, I lived trying to make myself a flute, to hold myself in a way that lets a wind blow through me. Held that way, what I am is not that important. The song is important. Or maybe, better still, “important” is a silly word. There is this bit of moving me. There is a world. The winds and the stuff I’m made from have lasted for lengths of time that I can’t quite imagine. (I’m trying; it’s fun to try). I can build walls to hold back all this around me. I can open up to it, and let it sing through me. My choice? Yes, my choice–but not all choices are the same.
                Nothing is explained. I don’t think that’s a threat, or a complaint, or a plea. I think it’s an observation. We learn and wonder, question and explore. We make discoveries about how light bends or plants lift water above our heads. We make art about color and movement. Our knowledge brings us closer to the mystery, but it doesn’t explain our curiosity or how come the laws are as they are. We learn how the world turns, but that’s not really an answer. Things reach to us with their existence, not their explanations. As they blow by we can struggle, or open our mouths and let them sing.

                “I guess that’s what happens to everybody who comes, he continued. We forget what we came for, but there’s this reflex to act like we still have some secret plan.”
                -Yuri Herrera, Signs Preceding the End of the World (trans. Lisa Dillman)

                I don’t have a plan. Yep. No plan. I’ve checked the drawers of my desk, the spare inches of my bookshelf, the complex filing system that might look like a pile on my floor. I have a lot of ideas. Some pencils. Socks that need washing. Seashells, and orange leaves. A turkey feather and glass beads. Walnuts from the back yard. But a plan?
                Part of me keeps thinking that I’ll figure out this teaching thing. I’ll find the steps, A then B then C, and then I’ll just follow those and my students will Learn, Understand, Care, Work, and other Actions with capital letters. Another part of me–Todd, we’ll call him–looks at that first part and says, Plhhh! If you did that, says Todd, you’d stop moving, you’d stop questioning, wondering, dancing, and it’s that questioning wonder you’re trying to teach anyway. You’d be bored. You’d be boring. You’d try to force people through your ABC sausage machine, and if those people had actually Learned anything about Caring, they’d rebel. And possibly, adds Todd, throw you in a lake.
                Every time a class doesn’t go perfectly, I get mad at Todd, and I tell myself I should figure out those three perfect steps. Then for a few days I act like I have a secret plan. I act like I’ve understood everything, weighed everything; like it’s all solved, and I’m certain. Don’t worry about me, I say with my smiles: I’ve got it all figured out.
                Sometimes that feels good. Sometimes that feels constricting–I stay on the same path, or break violently away from it, to make it clear that I’m Doing Something. Sometimes my Doing Something gets in the way of all the other somethings (lower case “s”) I could be doing. Sometimes, inside, it feels like I’m doing all this because I’m scared. What if I wasn’t–or at least, what if I wasn’t scared of that, scared of the hurly-burly?
                There are things I’d like to do. There are journeys I started years ago, journeys I hope to continue for years to come. I have values and friends and loves and communities. I have skills I practice, and skills I’d like to pick up. I have work I intend to keep doing. I have habits: walking, occasionally vacuuming, trying to help. I don’t, however, have a secret plan. I don’t understand everything that’s happening. Do you?

                “The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful.”
                -Professor E. M. Ashford in Margaret Edson’s W;t

                “Now is a time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.
                I thought being extremely smart would take care of it. But I see that I have been found out.” -Professor Vivian Bearing, Ashford’s former student, near her death in W;t

                Until recently, I thought that whatever important work I managed in my life would happen in “important moments.” Inspired moments. I tried to find my way toward ‘total effort’ because I thought that’s how you find transcendence. (Poems that sing themselves. Laws that are fair. Houses that really, really house). These days I’m not so sure. That’s one way to transcendence. When I’m climbing a mountain, I love the immersion of skin and stone, the world poured into a touch. But I don’t think it’s the only way.
                W;t follows Professor Vivian Bearing as she struggles with the idea of living, the idea of dying, and the pain of chemotherapy. Bearing tells us near the beginning that the play will end with her death. A little bit before that end, Ashford, Vivian’s old teacher–the one who said that “effort must be total”–comes back into her life for one more scene. Ashford climbs up onto Vivian’s hospital bed. She reads a children’s story to the grown woman who was once her student. In that moment, I don’t think Ashford–who’s probably brilliant–is using the far reaches of her intellect. I don’t think she’s pushing the edge of what’s possible. I think she’s sharing a moment with someone, and with simplicity. She’s being present. She’s being kind.
                I think lots of the work I do in the world is done in little moments. Genius is fun, and lightning is bright, but it’s long, soaking rains that refill ground water. If any spirits are out there reading this, and they’ve got a bottle of inspiration to pass around, I’m not saying I don’t want a sip. I hope to taste lightning again. But until that sip I’ll be here, working where I am, loving where I can. Breathing, for here, for now, and sharing in whatever little half-way ways I can.
                I don’t have that bottle of lightning, but there’s water here, and a few minutes. Following Ashford, following Bearing, what I have I’m happy to share.