“Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.” -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights

                I have this experience of looking. Searching, you could call it. I remember one rough night, in undergrad, where I sat crying alone beneath a tree on memorial hill, wanting someone to talk to. And that loneliness is real. I don’t want to dismiss it, but I also remember all the people I met, all the people who welcomed me, and beyond the people, that tree (which I also remember climbing), that hill (where I sat watching lightning stitch through the sky), that sky (where birds came visiting, singing about spring). More recently, as a big social gathering, I felt the pull of this person and that person and another person I wanted to meet. My eyes kept glancing around. Which meant away from the people I was talking to. And then I felt a quiet moment of oh yes, here.
                If we sink a spoon into that fact, Gay writes. And eating oatmeal this morning, I wanted to sink my spoon into the quiet moments between looking. I mean: I went for a walk and a blackbird landed in the tall grass, and for a moment that was all there was, all there needed to be. Joy. I mean: I’ve always loved taking the bus because sometimes a bus driver asks “how’re you?” and I say “I’m enjoying that it’s a little cooler, how are you?” Joy. I mean mosquitos still bite my ankles when I go outside, and that’s itchy afterwards, but everytime I sit on the grass I’m awash with roots and fluttering leaves. In the spaces between (and beneath, and beyond, and instead of) my searching, there is such a depth of connection, of relating to one another. An overlapping us that washes outward. And this morning I dipped my spoon into that along with my oatmeal. It tasted like evening light through a glass of water when the crickets are chirping.

                “To restore passion to the classroom or to excite it in classrooms where it has never been, professors must find again the place of eros within ourselves and together allow the mind and body to feel and know desire.” -bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

                I’m thinking about the possibility of passion, desire and delight inside the classroom, and near the classroom in other education spaces. Of course hooks doesn’t mean “eros” as in (only) sexuality. She means — well, it’s Chapter 13 in Teaching to Transgress, and I’ll call it a lift and a want and a yes of the heart, mind, and body. Reading hooks, I feel that passion, that possibility of engaging with each other as we become ourselves and become a community. That feeling is rare in most of my reading/studying/writing. I could wonder why, but instead, right now, I’m remembering.
                Remember when you were showering and a question came to you, a how or a what about, and the question washed with the water across your skin? And the water soaked into you, like rain into earth, waking seeds? I’ve lived that. I’ve also “learned” to stop following those questions, but I think we can learn to believe in them and share them again, too.
                Remember when you read that poem (or that song lyric) that took a secret part of yourself, a locked room that you didn’t visit and certainly didn’t share, and spoke to you there?  Spoke to you of the locked stale air but also of the door, the lock that could be unlocked, the window that could be open, and as the poet said themselves you realized I’ve felt that way but didn’t know how to say it? I remember that.
                Remember when we started building something together, I can’t remember if it was a garden between our houses or a book we wanted to co-write, and the could be of our making became a river carrying us along to maybe and we’ll see? I remember that, too.

                “I locate myself alongside those who labor toward emancipatory ends.” -Sarah Keeton, Tracing the Past to (Re)imagine the Future: A Black Queer Pedagogy of Becoming

                I started writing — and studying, and teaching — out of joy. The delight of sharins. Of making. Of maybe. And I started out of a hurt confusion. A sense of lost. Of bewilderment, and trying to understand how we fit into a world that fit together. Reading Sarah Keeton, I’m reminded that relationships are the clearest maps I’ve ever had.
                As a kid, hiking with my parents, I didn’t love looking at maps. My dad always did. He’d gesture between the page and the horizon, pointing out and that’s Mount Gabb, and Bear Creek Spire, and Royce Peak. I think, at twelve, a sense of where we are — because I was wondering that, too — came more from listening to the creek, or dipping into. From watching the clouds swimming like whales through sunset light, or lying on my belly to watch an insect moving along the edge of a lake. From each other, when “each other” includes all that. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to like paper maps more. I’ve kept some from places I’ve been (St. Petersburg, Russia; Starved Rock State Park in Illinois). But more than these printings of roads and trails I go back to relationships. Like many of my friends, I come to reading (and studying and writing and meeting people, and talking with those I know) as ways of looking for home. And home has always been the nested, particular yous and mes and wes that gather like clumps of grass and swimming creatures at the lake’s edge.

                “Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. […]  If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.”
-Ben Goldfarb, The Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter

                My friend Ben Goldfarb’s new book (Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet) comes out in September. I can’t wait to read it, and still, I also can’t read it yet, so instead I’ve been thinking about two things. First, the undergrad afternoons Ben and I spent playing pool and chatting, the balls scattering across the table as our ideas bounced off each other in easy chatter. Second, Ben’s first book, Eager. And that means beavers. At its heart, for me, Eager is about repositioning the way some US conversations think about humans and other-then-humans. About how we could imagine ourselves as part of an ecosystem, instead of ‘masters’ over it. To get there, Eager’s about how so many of the things we struggle with (too much water in floods, not enough water in summer as plants wither; that’s just the start) can be helped be a good beaver. Or a bad beaver. Like a punk greaser beaver with slicked back hair and a switchblade— that one would help, too. 
                I’m not going to try and explain how it is that beavers do things that our clever engineering struggles with. Ben’s done that already. But sitting here, now, I’m struck by how the memory of playing pool blurs into the promise of the book. Before I’d read Eager as suggesting a kind of partnership—human families and beaver families could all gain from working together. And I think that’s true, but now, next to the emphasis on work, I’m thinking about something that’s more like friendship. Like games on long afternoons. A playful relationship of curiosity, bouncing off each other in easy chatter and as our lives cross and interweave in the paths we walk and the water we share.

                “There are many benefits to being an artist that I’m grateful for, but if there is any downside, it might be that I’m never able to ‘shut things down.’ There are very few breaks from working or thinking about working; there’s always a project in my mind, something I’m working on at the moment, or a new potential project down the road.”
                -Brian Rea, in introducing Death Wins a Goldfish

                A few weeks ago some friends and I sat outside, shaded by a beautiful brick and ivy wall, talking about rest. About rest rituals. We decided to try purposefully doing nothing for five minutes a day. Sit outside. Relax into the branches blowing. Lay down and enjoy the cool hardwood floor. (I haven’t done it everyday, but I’ve done it more since our conversation, and it’s lovely to have a community engaged in creating shared practices). A few days later, as I lay on a bench looking up at the leaves, I had a thought. It seemed like a good one. Like maybe something I should write down. And I realize, whenever I go into a rest space, I’m usually looking to take something back out. I’m looking to make the rest useful, to create something from it. Some writing or art, or an idea for a class I’m teaching. I told that to my friend and she said, “Azlan, that’s bad.” And we agreed. And we laughed.
                So I don’t want to do that anymore. Not all the time. I don’t think this is particular to artists. (Many of the teachers I know would relate to Rea’s idea of always being on).. I think this is about a culture of producing, of mining ourselves for whatever precious metals or at least burnable coal we might find. And I don’t want to think of myself as a mine. So that thought I had, lying on the bench, it fluttered away on the leaves. Exactly as it should. I breathed.

                “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
                -Ross Gay, The Book of Delights: Essays (in which Gay writes about all these difference experiences of delight)

                In the last few days I’ve been noticing (even more than I usually do) how much any way of thinking gets me into a way-of-thinking, an exercised muscle-shape of movement that makes the same movement easier moving forward.
                Three examples:  my partner and I have been playing Mice & Mystics with a friend. It’s a board game where players work together to lead characters, all mice, through different rooms of an adventurous castle, and last night after an evening of playing together my dreams were all castles and collaborative decisions, all negotiations of if-I-go-here-will-you-go-there. 
                Or again: I tend to snack when I’m trying to get myself to “keep working.” I think for me it’s part comfort, part an attempt to weave the joy of my senses back into sending emails. Then this summer I spent a month with my brother, who doesn’t snack much, and I found myself enjoying a little hum of hunger. I’m fortunate enough to have access to enough food, and supported in that privilege, there was a delight in this quickening want, this sense of not-yet-but-soon.
                Or again: I just picked back up a Starcraft, the kind of video game where you’re always trying to build something, collect something, fast fast, train more troops and order them across the map. And if I play for thirty minutes, I look away from my screen and I feel myself wanting to build something, collect something, move something, fast fast.
                Maybe all this is obvious. I’ve heard it said and seen it written lots of times (though yes, I have a special love for Gay’s framing). And maybe it’s in how I attend to this “obvious,” what I look for in it, that I develop this muscle for what I see.

“Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters, 
the parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof, 
the unbowed bully-crushers, 
the bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers, 
fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.”
                -Zach Weinersmith, Bea Wolf

                Since I first got my hands on Bea Wolf last Sunday, I think I’ve read those opening lines to four different people. I’ve called people up to read them out loud. I’ve listened to friends read them out loud. I’ve read them out loud with my partner, twice, and also some other wonderful passages from later in the story. 
                Bea Wolf retells about the first third of the Beowulf story, except the heroes are kids and the monstrous Grendel is a horrible adult whose touch turns kids into adults. And more than that, for me, Bea Wolf is an utter delight to read. The sounds. The rhythms. Syllables that taste sharp as radishes or smooth as fresh whipped cream. Reading, I wonder, when did I first fall in love with that, the sound of words made into a game, a campfire, a frantic of friendly feast? “Snip-snap-snout,” my fairy godmother (my mom’s good friend, and a long time Waldorf teacher) would say after a story, “This story’s told out.” Or “Jabberwocky” when it was only sounds and dreams to me. Or bedtime songs my mom sang. Or Yoda sayings. I have lines of poetry that taste like winter evenings. Lines that are deep and mysterious as falling asleep. Lines that glow with fairy wings. I read a lot, these days, but it’s gotten easier somehow to miss that magic. And Bea Wolf brings it rushing back with hands sticky and dirty from candy and dirt, and ready to keep playing.

                In imagining how the earth might end: “or maybe the earth will shrink / it will get so tiny that we can hold it in our hands / and we’d see every side, every part that we used to ignore / maybe then we’d feel big enough to start protecting it.” -Tillie Walden, “The Fader”

                A few weeks ago, when I started trying to write about Tillie Walden’s “The Fader,” I’d recently gone swimming off the coast of Orcas Island. The water was on the edge between cold and cool. The waves lapped with sunlight, washing out toward other islands. For me, islands have a special way of showing the size of the sea. Looking at that little tuft of land, off on the horizon, makes me feel distance. And I said I swam, but I barely moved away from the beach I came from. A few strokes. I was weightless for a moment, diving beneath the water. Out past me were more beaches, more tufts of land, more watery valleys. 
                I think “The Fader” catches my heart because of how it invites me to think about scale. Last spring a friend pointed out that we spend most of our time in contexts designed for someone about our size. Rooms. Chairs, tables, doorways, cars, refrigerators, as though a human body that’s somewhere around 5 or 6 feet is the measuring stick for the world. My friend said that’s why they loved backpacking. Forests, ridges, rivers, snails, all these have their own scales. And then, of course, in other conversations, we say how small we are—specks of dust on the speck of dust that is earth in the smudge that is the Milky Way in the cloud (or the ocean?) that some of us call the Laniakea Supercluster. And in other conversations we’re so large. Large enough to be pushing (or have pushed) other animals to extinction. To fish until fisheries collapse. To shift the climate. And then Walden writes and draws. My familiar sense of scale shakes, and past it, I wonder what it would be like to feel our smallness (and the world’s smallness), our expanse (and the world’s expanse).

                “The People of Youzhi: In an ancient land in the middle of the Western Steppes, renowned for its beauty and lush flora, has lived this warm and welcoming people. They have mastered the art of zhi and can speak the earthen tongue.”
                -Nie June, Seekers of the Aweto: Book 2 (Strange Alliances), translated by Edward Gauvin and and Helen Chao

                One of the creatures in Seekers of the Aweto—a kind of magical child—speaks only the ‘earthen tongue,’ a mysterious language shown in characters Nie June makes up for the story. We readers can’t understand. Staring at one of these characters, a bit like a cursive r into a u with two dots over it, I start thinking about all the things I can only say by not saying.
                Years ago, while teaching, I invited students to make up words that they needed but English didn’t have. There were some delightful ones. Reading Nie June, I wonder about a different version of the exercise. What are the symbols for things I need to say (or need to hear said) but that can’t be put into any recognizable words? This afternoon, in some tougher hours, I tried to turn back toward what I was feeling and seeing. I’ve been practicing that in the last years. Sometimes naming “it” helps—I’m stressed, or I miss my family. But sometimes there are no names, no words—what symbol for the lethargy of my mind, inside too long on a hot day, and the trees shimmering in a quick wind outside, and the silence after I’ve chatted a bit with my brother on the phone? What sound for a soundless pause of breathing?
                Maybe one I can’t read, in the earthen tongue.

                “I’m glad I’m here with you.”
                -Cody in Ray Nadine’s Light Carries On

                In the last weeks a few books have played with my ideas about what here means, and how we can be here to love each other. One of these is Ray Nadine’s Light Carries On. It’s a love story between Leon and Cody. And Cody’s a ghost. When they go to touch hands Leon’s fingers go through Cody’s. Leon can reach into Cody’s chest, and he feels a chill, but he doesn’t feel skin. At one point the idea of that touchless-ness almost drives Cody away: “I can’t hold your hand or comfort you when you’re sad,” he sobs. But this is a love story. The two find a way to being “here” together, in part, by sharing a love of music, and in part by sharing other moments that they love— the Planetarium, a concert, a beach where they can look back at Chicago’s lights.
                This story might’ve hit me hard because I just flew from Seattle back to Illinois. Over the summer, visiting the West Coast meant moments of connection and love—with my two siblings, my parents, my older brother’s kids, my partner’s family as I get to know them more. With beaches and hills where I grew up. How can all those stay “here” while I’m in Illinois and they’re in Seattle?
                It’s an old question. I’m not sure Nadine’s answer is new, but I did feel it. Like a shared trip to the planetarium. Like looking off at city lights beneath the stars, far away and close. Like ghost fingers on my fingers, and with love they’re here, too.