“There is no need to arrive somewhere—each step is the arrival to concentration, joy, insight, and the momentary enlightenment of aliveness.” -Thích Nhất Hạnh, How To Walk

                I’ve been saying I feel tired lately. Wondering how to recharge my energy. Then last week I walked with my friend, and they told me they don’t think “energy” is really a thing. Or it’s not what I usually pretend it is, at least. A living body isn’t a battery, it doesn’t have a single kind of electrical charge poured in and pulled out to turn the fan blades or shine the light. Instead of having energy to carry us through and keep us going and create with, my friend and I started talking about all the different things that lift us in our lives.
                Joy. Joy is one for me. And pleasure, which is why I start reaching for something tasty when I’m struggling with a project and telling myself keep going. Concentration, that act of bending my thoughts in one direction—focus on the keyboard, not the wind in from the window. After enough concentrating my mind wants to swim off, more a dozen minnows in a lake than a single sailing ship with a rudder. Or wants to drift, dandelion puffs on the sky. For me there’s also a sense of performing, of putting myself together to show some certain side. After enough of that I’m in my boxers with messy hair.And curiosity: a pull toward why and what and wow, but sometimes that pull fades, or I’ve asked too much from it, and it goes quiet. Silence. That’s another thing that carries me. And love, alive in so much of what I do, and fear, alive in so much of what I do (as I try to help), and the shadows where love and fear aren’t currently lapping. So joy, pleasure, concentration, performance, curiosity, love, fear…strand by strand, I’m untying the knot, touching all the threads I usually pretend are just energy.
                Which means tired (and awake) aren’t a single somewhere I leave behind, or get to. The dance has more steps than that, and more stillnesses.

                “Unlike me, my character has the opportunity to have a heart to heart with her mom before she dies.” -Kaighla Rises

                Today I’ve been teaching at a writing retreat in Allerton—a mansion, now a retreat center and park, some thirty-five minutes from my home in Illinois. I got to meet Kaighla. In the same session where I wrote down her comment, quoted above, she wrote down this from me: “I love writing for what it can make true.”
                At around the time when my grandmother was moved to hospice, I brought my laptop to the hospital bed where she’d been sleeping. I wish I’d done it sooner. I chatted with her about her childhood, about her mother, about memories I’d never asked about. She answered some questions. Evaded others. So far I haven’t “done” anything with the writing from that afternoon, but I’m so glad, looking back, that I have that moment to reflect on. To hold. To ground into as memory and connection. Today, in another session, I was talking with a writer about their family memoir, and we started talking about inviting family members to contribute—writing letters, maybe, explaining the project and asking if people wanted to respond by sharing a story. I don’t know if that writer will ever make the invitation. If they do, I don’t know if it will be taken up. And of course, writing a novel where the character gets to have a heart to heart with their mother that you never got to have with yours isn’t going back in time, isn’t changing what happened. But it is love and hope for what was and what might be, isn’t it? It is a way of saying please, and feeling, and making space to hear whoever answers.

                “I want to talk to people who think like me, because they don’t think like me.”
                -David Wright Faladé

                I’ve been struck lately by how little I understand the movements inside what someone’s saying—and even more, the thinking behind those movements. Sometimes when it seems we agree, when we approach things in similar ways, I tend to assume we’re on the same ‘side.’ (As though different ways of thinking can be well imagined as sides). And so often we’re not.
                Here’s an example: months ago my friend and I were weeding in a garden. It was a pleasant kind of work, the shade and the sunlight, the repetitive, sensual task of touching leaves and stems. The gentle recognition of noticing the difference between garlic shoots and grass stems and peas and oxalis and all the other things I don’t have names for. Inside that task, I mentioned something about how peppers are spicy because the plant is “trying to stop itself from being eaten.” The plant wants its fruit to fall around its seeds, to decompose and become nutrients for those seeds. I was taught that sometime, way back in middle school. My friend (a much, much more engaged gardener than I am) listened, let the remark go, and circled back to it. The first thing I thought I understood in what they were saying was that lots of plants grow by having their fruit and seeds eaten and so spread about. Which would mean, in a way, that the plant wants its fruit eaten. I interpreted this as a strategy, as though the plant were playing games to maximize its chances of survival and reproduction. Then I listened to my friend some more, and I realized their ground level engagement with the garden was different. They said something like, “Everything kinda gives back, doesn’t it?” Not that the plant was using a strategy of seed transportation by birds’ stomachs, but that they understood plants as part of ecologies, and understood ecologies more in terms of relation and gifting than in terms of individual competition.
                In that string of moments, trailing back toward my middle school class and forward toward now and including those moments of kneeling in the garden, I started trying to understand this one small piece of how my friend thinks. Which is not like me. The more I sit with it, the more I think about all the different ways of thinking and being unfolding all around me. The grass. The peas. The garlic. The oxalis. All the plants I have no name for.

“…what happened? Did you find her?”
“…No.”
                -Chris W. Kim, Adherent

                [Plot spoilers ahead!] I’m not sure what to think of Adherent. At its heart it’s about Em, a young woman growing up in a small quietly post-apocalyptic society, and her search for a writer whose scribbled notebooks seem to hold some secret. Some treasure. Some curious hope. The story’s a fable, maybe, about how hard it feels to communicate. After a long journey through different communities (a kind of travel that people in Adherent don’t usually do), Em finds the writer. She talks to them. She sees the way forward that the writer is pointing, and decides she won’t follow it. The writer will never go back home. Em wants to. When she gets back, Em’s friend asks if she found the writer. After the quiet beat of a still frame Em answers, “No.”
                I think Kim overturns, or perhaps rewrites, that trope about ‘getting everything you dreamed of and it’s nothing you want.’ If I get what I wanted, and it turns out rotten, empty, then it feels like I’ve done something wrong. I’ve desired wrong. The world’s horizons pull in. I’ve read that story. But instead, in Kim’s hands, the journey isn’t finished. It’s not that I started running and it turns out regularly running sucks (true story. Why do people do that?). It’s that I thought about more regular habits of delight in movement, fast-hearted joy in sweat, and the first way I tried wasn’t it. No. Which opens the way for more possible yesses. If the story I usually read closes down the world, limits that sense of possibility and wonder, Kim’s story gently opens far horizons and the leaves at my feet. The last pages of Adherent show us the forest. Scattered leaves. I haven’t found the connection I meant to find. But there is so much possibility here.

                “I can’t recall much from when I was little.” -Briana Loewinsohn, Ephemera

                I’m not sure how much I can recall from when I was little. I remember being surprised when the tadpoles changed, and never being able to catch the moment when tadpoles grew legs and became frogs. They were boring until that moment when they’d already been marvelous. I remember walking along a steep creek with my parents and older brother. I usually didn’t like hiking the way my parents did, but the creek’s little waterfalls and pools conjured worlds of tiny towns with pebble sized houses next to the water. Fairy houses, my mom might’ve called them. They made me into something of a giant, or maybe a cloud, drifting by and curious and half real to them as they were half real to me, and usually I was little (am I six, in this memory? Seven?). And as a child I knew there was a poetry to size and scale, to how we imagine ourselves as bigger or smaller, casting shadows over tadpoles as we stand in a tree’s dappled shade.
                Loewinsohn’s memoir plays back and forth through time. After pieces of her sometimes fraught relationship with her mother, we get a page of her as a child lying next to her mom. On the next two-page spread, we see Loewinsohn-as-an-adult lying on Loewinsohn-as-a-child’s other side. The three share the space: a woman, a child, a woman who is also the child. Reading, I’m struck by how so many of my words for the past pretend I’m attempting to re-create something. To recall my childhood. To remember. I’m struck by how time plays both ways, the kid I was sitting here looking over my shoulder, curious about the words I’m typing (and wanting to go find some tadpoles, wanting to see the magic, though a little in love with missing it and so knowing it’s somehow washing beneath the surface). And the adult I was (before I sat here as a kid again) looks at the kid, a little wistful, a little confused and a little kind about the kid’s big thoughts and confusions. We take care of our many selves through time, don’t we? The child points out squirrels looking at me. The adult shares it’s okay that you’re scared. And not just our selves, but our communities. We lie down in the grass together. It’s more a washing together than a recreating: I might not recall much, but I’m calling so much from when I was little, and so much from when I was little is calling me.

                “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.