“You don’t talk about the shadows with your classmates, right?”
“Right. I think a lot of kids in my class can’t see them.”
                -Shima Shinya, Glitch (Volume 1)

                A few days ago I had one of those moments where I wondered, really wondered, about some kind of common natural process that I usually take for granted. It wasn’t what happens inside a lightbulb to emit the light, but it was something like that. A foundational “how does that work?” while looking at the world. I can’t remember what it was because I thought about it for a moment and let it go. Reading Shinya, I start thinking more about some everyday mysteries — about the ones I see, the ones I don’t. And about how easy it is to stop talking about them, especially when I’m not sure anyone else is “seeing” them. Or when I can so easily stop seeing them myself.
                Years ago, in undergrad, my friend Ryan and I fell into an excited conversation about some famous philosophical problem. (The Ship of Theseus, maybe, or Leibniz’s thought problem about a brain the size of a windmill so you can walk inside). It was a lovely conversation. A few days later I brought it up with Ryan and some other friends. I turned to Ryan to help explain whatever the philosophical problem was. Ryan smiled — interested, but not taking the lead. They said something like: “I’m not seeing it right now. Can you help get me started?” At the time I was surprised—just two days ago we’d been excited about this together, and now they didn’t understand? Looking back, I’m struck instead by how my own interest — my ability to see, and to connect, and to wonder — changes day to day. And by Ryan’s gentle recognition that they weren’t connecting, and that, through the right conversation, they might start seeing something that caught their eye.

                “You genuinely believe a person can sum up her life in just three words?” -Mirinae Lee, 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster

                My sibling Maple’s visiting, and lately we’ve been talking about the way stories say and don’t say things. I’m coming off a couple-year kick of being pretty frustrated by how the stories I write seem, in my mind, to make lies: they arrange moments and experiences into a sequence that ‘makes sense,’ that ‘has a direction,’ but that sense and direction is imposed by the story making. The writing (I’ve been feeling) draws lines that weren’t there in the living. My sibling resists, insisting that they appreciate stories — and music, and photography — precisely because all these help them understand what they’re feeling. All these are different camera lenses turned toward a piece of life, and showing something.
                One of these talks happened while we were waiting at the laundromat. Our clothes went round and round. So, I suppose, did we, playing through how our ideas curled and flopped. Maple is also a wonderful photographer. They wouldn’t say that: they would say they like looking through a camera, and they love how that practice changes the way they see light. Then today they turned around their laptop to show me a picture I love. It’s a sink, half in shadow, half in bright sun.  “Where’s that?” I asked. “At the laundromat,” they said. And I know the sink they must have been looking at when they took the picture. I’ve seen that sink, and used it. And I missed something about its fullness until I looked at it in Maple’s flat picture.
                So I don’t think that anyone can sum up her life in just three words. I’m frustrated by stories. I’m also excited about how words (and pictures) show something beside what they’re showing. How, in this moment, my window (which mostly reflects the kitchen) shows also a street lamp outside, the suggestion of a tree, a world I mostly can’t see but can’t stop feeling here.

                “Thank you to my woes, dear friends, beloveds, and lovers, who have walked toward pleasure with me, refusing to settle.” -adrienne maree brown, “gratitude,” Pleasure Activism (on the page another book might call “Acknowledgements”)

                “What a difference a community makes.” -Shelley Parker-Chan, “Acknowledgements,” He Who Drowned the World

                “I am always reaching for your fingers.” -Joshua Whitehead, “Acknowledgements,” Making Love with the Land

                I’m working on draft twenty-nine of my novel — a draft I’ll send to publishers — and today in the shower I was writing an acknowledgements page. There are so many people who carried water to grow this book. Whose questions inspired these characters. Whose laughter lives in their voices. My voices. Our voices, I hope.
                I think something like an acknowledgements page — that act of gratitude — is a lovely exercise for more than just books. A naming, incomplete, more loving gesture than polished list, of the communities I’m part of. When I started writing this post, I thought I might include a fragment of my list, but I realize that’s not what this post is about. This is about how adrienne maree brown, Shelley Parker-Chan, and Joshua Whitehead all invite me toward practices of connection. This is about how I’ll lie in bed tonight, drifting through some of the interwoven moments and interactions and relationships that are the music I sing with. One friend’s poetry. A game played with friends some ten years ago. A rock I picked up on the beach. My siblings, one of whom I’m about to pick up from the train station. It’s lovely to make space to focus on these relationships, and think how they interact. It’s lovely to feel that space all through me.

“Why document this, as if forgetting were the worst thing?”
                -Annie Liu, from “The Story,” Border Vista
“and what happens next / I don’t remember yet.”
                -Annie Liu, from “Memory in a Foreign Language,” Border Vista

                I usually inhabit a kind of productive logic in which everything is supposed to have its use. Year by year, we’re supposed to be smarter. More capable. Or to put it another way, I was watching The Great British Bake Off, and the contestants were talking about how you had to multi-task and schedule out every minute— while this is mixing, that is setting; while that cooks, this cools. I got excited about all that careful attention to using every minute in six or seven ways. Then I got sad about it. I wanted to bake with the bakers who do one thing at a time, sometimes staring out the window, sometimes forgetting the recipe, sometimes lapsing into a long memory of someone they only kind of knew. Maybe that immersion in a moment, unscripted and undocumented, makes the act of baking a cake a bit more like tasting a cake—butter and chocolate and spices—or like sitting, afterward, with friends, the taste fading.
                and what happens next / I don’t remember yet. Reading Annie Liu’s book, I feel a different kind of time, a different kind of sinking into now and next, memory and forgetting. In “The Story” Liu leaves blank lines for a story she hears: the space is there, and empty. It’s not gathered into something concrete, though it’s also not erased. She refers to it, even if we don’t see the “it” she’s referring to. There’s something here even as something’s gone. So I think about baking: the heat of the oven and the smell of the cake. The way both slip away. A blurry moment after mixing the batter together and before—who knows what?
I want to live more in time like that.

                Hilary showed me this picture a few weeks ago. She’s a maker, hands alive with a maker’s knowledge, and she fixes all kinds of instruments at the Music Inn in New York City. Some of them are instruments she’s never worked on before. Lots of the repairs, like this one to replace the goat skip top, mean working with a variety of materials. Wood. Metal. Skin. Bone. Hair. That means she needs to keep learning, and keep a gentle grip on what she knows. Following the way another maker balanced weights and forces, and the way these materials change and stay steady.
                When Hilary showed me this picture we both went silent, looking at the wood, the way it’s been carved away, the peg ends that anchor the sympathetic strings. It looked like a place I could go. Like sandstone canyons and caves I’ve walked through in Cedar Mesa and Escalante Canyons. I fell silent a lot in those places, too—with wonder, with curiosity, with delight, with a sense of my own smallness as I climbed these thin ribbons of air down into earth. I love Hilary’s picture because, in it, I see a hint of how worlds cohere. How they play together on music, lean together with rock walls, weave together as we talk and share. How details come together into one version of here. There’s a sense of connection—fingers on wood, breath in the narrow breadth of a sandstone canyon—that doesn’t explain everything, but that instead draws close enough to touch. Wood. Stone. Skin. Bone. These pieces joining together into a world where, for a little while, we walk.

“…places do not have single, unique ‘identities’; they are full of internal conflicts.”
-Doreen Massey, “A Global Sense of Place”

                These days, my work desk is also our breakfast table, the one I share with my partner and plates of eggs and afternoon board games with friends. In the last few weeks I started thinking it was hard having one place that played all these roles at once. Sometimes I’d go to set down my books and my laptop, and find last night’s dinner plates. But then I started thinking about Massey, and about going back to Amherst College.
                The last time I went to Amherst I was lonely. Most of my friends had graduated. All the little groups on the quad weren’t groups I knew how to join. At the time I remember thinking, “this isn’t home anymore.” Reading Massey, I start thinking instead how Amherst always was and wasn’t home. Or how calling somewhere “home” doesn’t cover up the connection and loneliness that both live there. Since graduating I’ve talked with lots of people about our time —some experiences like mine, and some so different—and those conversations lead off into so many ways that belonging and how one belongs is threaded through with questions of class, race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and so much more. Amherst College was never one thing. 
                Sitting at my breakfast table, I think about ideas of “knowledge” that position it in the library—and away from the kitchen, the mess of last night’s dinner and the making of this morning’s breakfast. I think about the expectation that where I work and where I cook and eat with my partner should be separate places. I think about my internalized expectations of productivity, responsibility, and success, and how those interact with my internalized ideas of joy, connection, community, rest. Scrambled eggs. I don’t think I’m struggling with one place that is all this. I’m struggling with how all this is “supposed to be” separated out, arranged neatly, and how this separating out, this weighing, is often in the service of creating a hierarchy. An ordering of importance, and time. “I’ll cook when I’m done writing,” I often tell myself. And places are many things at once. Today I think and yawn and stretch while cooking my partner breakfast. It feels strange to call this place “mine.”

                “I feel that this conference brought it all together for me. I can fit in with these people, these ideas. They all understood implicitly the importance of the relationships that we built together, between us, our homelands and our ideas. This is where I belong as a scholar, as an Indigenous person, as an Indigenous scholar.” -Shawn Wilson describing a 2002 Indigenous Scholars Conference in Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods (2008)

                In 2022 I went to a really cool five day conference. I met wonderful people facilitating all sorts of cool programs and projects. I went on a hike. I was part of a little “home group” — seven of us, connected before the conference, and checking in together at least once a day. The idea was that everyone would have a few people who were a kind of “home,” even as we came together from many places. I remember one of the people in my group (someone I really liked) commenting how close you start to feel to people at a conference like this. And commenting, a few days later, how after the conference we would all drift apart again. “You realize that’s okay, too,” they said. “That’s how it goes.”
                And it was okay. I guess. I could say that I carry the people from that conference with me (I do: I’m thinking about them now), but looking back, really I wonder: why have it go that way? Like most of the educational programs I’ve been part of, the conference I went to seemed to assume that there was something else we were doing that was more important than whatever bonds we were forming. Maybe that something else was supposed to be ‘the ideas themselves:’ the refined understandings that went into our ‘professional development.’ Maybe we were supposed to be enriched, individually, and take that ‘individual’ enrichment back to our ‘separate’ institutions. Maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, I’m not convinced.  I think “That’s how it goes” because our social systems led participants to go that way. Reading Shawn Wilson, I want to work toward a conference that’s about the bonds themselves, the relationships, the ways of being together and in the world. Looking back years later, I want to hear someone say “That conference brought it all together for me.” That would mean, years later, we were still talking, sometimes at least. Maybe someone else would say, “That’s how it goes.” Or they’d say: “I belong here.”

                “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
                of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
                The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” -Elizabeth Bishop, from “One Art”

                On November 1st I got to hear Alexis Pauline Gumbs talk, and I wanted to write tonight’s post about something she said. But I’ve lost the paper with my notes. It’s been a frustrating day, anyway, and running around my house those notes felt like something I had to find. And Gumbs also talks about loving whales when they’re close so she can see them, and when they’re far, deep, awash in a place she’ll never know. That made me think about having.
                So much of graduate school is predicated on having more and more. More knowledge, more expertise. So much of the American idea of success is predicated on having more and more. And losing isn’t very hard to master. I was so upset, as a kid, when I lost the mechanical pencil I used to do my math homework. The pencil was how I worked, working was how I did well, doing well was—was what I had to be doing, wasn’t it? And it’s so easy, sitting here and thinking about losing, to turn losing into a kind of having. I still have my memories of Gumbs’ wonderful talk. I still got to see her. (US media likes this losing that is a having. We’ll always have Paris, says Bogart in Casablanca). But tonight, instead, I’m thinking about whales deep beneath the waves. I’m thinking about friends I’ll never see again. Friends I’ll never get to make. Somewhere along the way I learned to keep every scrap of paper, every line of writing, like catching at seaspray. I don’t think this is a post about “letting go,” or something simple like that. As a kid I was terrified by the depth of the sea. Pulling at my feet. Endless. Tonight is sitting with the kid who can’t bear to lose a pencil. Swimming with the kid who’s frightened by the depth of the sea. Swimming with me. And feeling something sink down, away. Losing. None of this was ever mine. How can I stop trying so hard to “keep” a touch of the waves?

“I have not said a word
aloud all day.
Sounds cease.
Silence, solitude,
Peace.”
                -Ursula K. Le Guin, from “At Cannon Beach”

                I want to make room for quiet, for not doing, for peace. Over the last year I’ve tried describing this space as a pot of soil on my windowsill. Carefully tended. Watered every now and then. Rich damp loam, rich to my fingers, in which I plant no seeds. Caring, instead, for the soil that is already there.
                Today I had several Tasks, and I did most of them. Not quite as many as I’d planned. It usually goes that way. Then I had five-ish hours on zoom for different commitments, and by the end, the noise of the screen and the speakers had me buzzing till I wanted to close my eyes. Don’t get me wrong: I liked the meetings I went to, and the people I met with. And I’m not sure I’m looking (like Le Guin) for sounds to cease. But after the last meeting, and after sitting for a little while, I went for a walk with my partner. Some of the maples are still holding their bright yellow leaves, flickering like bright currents of water washed up into the sky. Other trees have dropped all their leaves. Dark silhouettes. A couple talked on their way to the same park bench I’d been thinking of sitting on with my partner. We chatted a bit, my partner and I. We walked quietly. Cool evening air. Footsteps. A sky so deep, beneath the clouds, that you could swim in it. Maybe we did. I have a habit of filling my life with this and this and this, the trees and the bench and the clouds. Now I remember the and, the and, the and. The places between where I’d been looking. These openings. These presences. Peace.

                “The kaval’s institution is the village, and that institution got destroyed long before the flute’s institution of the orchestra started to crumble.” -Dani Nutting in the Q&A following “Flutes as Time Shelters: Bulgarian Becomings and the Instrumental Past,” Nov. 1, 2023

                Where do we go to learn? Who do we go to, and what kind of community do we imagine finding there?
                My friend Dani Nutting studies Bulgarian flute traditions. Earlier today I got to hear her speak, and wrote down this line from her answer to an audience question. In her talk, she’d discussed a Bulgarian flute tradition that was rooted in folk music and traveling musicians who played the kaval by ear. She’d also discussed a Bulgarian flute tradition, more “classical,” that arose after the import of classical music from Western Europe. This tradition saw itself as competing on an international stage. It was housed in schools that worked toward prestige, and invested in creating orchestras. The changing shape of these institutions (Dani emphasized) changes how we learn and make art and relate to each other.
                For years now I’ve seen these advertisements from MasterClass. Learn chess from Garry Kasparov, or “The Art of Storytelling” from Neil Gaiman. And don’t get me wrong, I like Neil Gaiman. But my favorite harmonica lesson was from a high school student of mine, sitting at the little pond on our campus. My point isn’t that my student Bobby was a “good” musician. Or a bad one. Maybe I’m trying to say that Ted talks bother me because there’s only one person on stage, and there are so many more in the audience, and I wonder what they would say. Beyond that, though, Dani helps me consider the scale I think about when I think of learning. And about the different ways that different scales nestle “art” into our lives. Sometimes I think of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with 55,000+ undergraduate and graduate students. Sometimes I think of a little pond. Sometimes an orchestra, sometimes a village, and all these places go growing and changing and weaving into each other.