“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.

                “She shook her head. Her steady brown eyes held mine, waiting for me to understand. I leaned in and listened to her with my body, willing her to say what I could not. Our breath rose and fell together like the drawing of tides.”
                -Adam Garnet Jones, “History of the New World,” in Love After The End

                It’s possible to listen with my body, isn’t it? Sometimes I forget that. Adam Garnet Jones brings me back so seamlessly. His passage is about a parent and their child, and it has me wondering about all the different ways I can listen with my body.
                I can listen with my fingertips when we’re holding hands. I can listen by looking, someone’s eyes holding my eyes, as the two are doing in the story. If we’re partner dancing I can listen with my weight, pressing into your hand behind my shoulder. I can listen with my breath. Breathing together, like the story describes here. I can listen with my tongue as I hold the taste of water or an apple slice. Listening can wash through all those ways.
                Lean in and listen with my body. Yesterday my partner and I swam out into the sound from a beach on Orcas Island. I heard the wash of the waves, the depth of the water. Floated for a moment, weightless, hearing the lift of seaweed toward the light, the shadow of seals through the currents. If I listen with my body (water on my skin) I recognize how close I am to these drawing tides.

                “Everything we see hides another thing. We always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible.” -René Magritte in a 1965 interview

                I ran across this quote sometime in my teens. I found it again in 2019, maybe on the wall of the Art Institute of Chicago, and took a picture of it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Not thinking about it all the time, consistently— the kind of thinking about it that also means forgetting about it, forgetting I took the picture, forgetting I went to the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019. And then today I ran across the picture on my computer and started wondering, when did I take that?
                Around ten or eleven, I fell in love with watching rivers. The way the current and the waves bend and rise, shaped by (and shaping) the rocks of their riverbed. The rocks, held in place and broken apart by tree roots. The trees, washed by and sipping the water. My parents taught me a kind of ‘reading the river’ that meant looking at what you could see to find something about what was harder to see: the direction of the current, the depth of the water, the way a wave would push a kayak. On Sunday I was out at a glacial river, the water so cloudy gray I could only see a few inches through it, and I thought it must be harder to read a river like that. A river you can barely see into. But I sat watching the water for a bit, and thought, well, it doesn’t seem that much harder. Maybe that’s what we’re always doing. Seeing something and something else beneath it. Seeing a little part of the interaction between river and riverbed and forest, between earth and sky. 
                That reminds me a little of me and the quote from Magritte — a song I hear, and forget about, and stumble back across. And sometimes hear myself humming.

                “My process of selection is driven both by my personal friendship and political networks, as well as by happenstance…” 
                -Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora

                I’ve been sitting with how the shape of what I think (and how I think) is also a map of who I know, of what groups have made me feel at home, what friendships I’ve worked to build, what causes I’ve taken up and where I’ve managed to listen.
                There are so many examples. On Friday night my brother and I took his two kids camping, thunder echoing above our heads, and I remembered an early camping trip when I helped carry my little brother (a year old, then, or thereabouts). On that trip years ago we walked in close to sunset, and when my little brother woke up in someone’s arms in the middle of the woods while we set up a tent, I could hear in their child’s voice that all of this felt normal. How could it not be, raised in the family we were raised in? Sometimes you woke up in the woods.
                And of course, since then, my little brother (like my older brother, like just about everyone I know) had challenged the way I think about things. They’ve directed my attention toward different viewpoints, different works of art. Day by day, quietly, they pull my selection of what I believe and what I look at towards what they believe, what they look at. This summer they played me a song I hated. They sang phrases from it. And now, weeks later, that song’s running through my head. It’s more interesting than I noticed at first. I find myself wanting to sing it. And wondering about the viewpoint this song takes up, the implications, for relationships and politics, of what it says.

“To my nieces and nephews, who need a better story — BL
For Kai — MG” 
                -Brittany Luby and Michaela Goade author dedications in their children’s book Encounter

                Encounter’s pages have lots of creatures in them. Seagulls. A mouse. A mosquito. Deer. A crab. Beluga whales. Wasps. A sign of a spider. In a way I suppose that’s true for lots of children’s books, but this one struck me with its shifting, expansive perspective. 
                Building on historical notes from 1534, Encounter imagines “an open and friendly meeting between a French sailor and a Stadaconan fisher” in what is now known as North America. The picture inside the front cover shows a beautiful sunrise seaside, and the view’s closer to a nesting seagull’s view than a person’s. In the middle of the story we spend time with both the French sailor and Stadaconan fisher (shifting between being closer to one, then the other, then close to both). When the animals speak up, Goade’s art puts us close to them. We look down with a seagull toward these two people on the beach. We retreat with a mosquito back into the leaves. When a mouse celebrates some crumbs left behind, we’re down in the grass, the people small shadows on our horizon.
                I love the gentle, generous way Encounter’s paintings bring us from sky  to grass to bushes and back to these humans’ hands. I’m writing this in my brother’s backyard. Three bunnies in view. They seem more interested in the green of the grass than the green of the page, but looking up from the book, I wonder, what do those tall ears make of my typing?

                “One year was enough to sear [the landscape] on the lens of memory…so that, in the studio alone with my dream I would record it like a diary entry, just like that.” -Dorothea Tanning on her time in Arizona, and on her 1944 painting Self-Portrait

                Tanning has me thinking about modes of diary-keeping as modes of memory, modes of thinking.
                For example, I spend a lot of time thinking about phrasing. Over the course of several days I toyed with the sentence above, rearranging words, wondering, forgetting and coming back. When I sat down to write, I habitually reworked the wording another four or five times. Wondering about clarity, sentence rhythm, sound. Wondering what it was that had so struck me as I stood in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, looking at Tanning’s Self-Portait—a tiny figure at the edge of an immense landscape, a bit like I was standing, now, before the largeness of her portrait. What’s the idea-seed here, I wonder as I write and rewrite, and more, how does it grow as I water it with words? 
                Spendings lots of time thinking about phrasing changes the way I interact with lots of things. Take song lyrics— phrases stick in my head, and the melodies usually slip through my fingers. Though now I’m thinking about it, a musician friend and I wrote a song together in the last few months, and since then I’ve been noticing melodies more. If diarying is a process of stitching words or shapes or images into the cloth of memories, does that process change what kind of thread my memory is ready for? And how I hold on—make real, for myself, what has happened?
                I have a friend whose sketched “diary” tends to include patterns from people’s shirts. Another friend whose “diary” includes movements, the way they’ve seen people walking. And I wonder, what am I “searing” into my dream?