“I want so badly to rub the sponge of gratitude
over every last thing, including you, which, yes, awkward,
the suds in your ear and armpit […]”
                -Ross Gay, from “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”

“This rider of winds, how awkward he is, and weak!
How droll he seems, who lately was all grace!”
                -Charles Baudelaire, from “The Albatross” [trans. Richard Wilbur]

                Seven or eight years ago, while teaching high school, I came up with a pet theory: maybe awkward wasn’t really a thing. Making friends takes emotional effort. Moving through a group, or a romance, takes emotional work. Maybe “awkward” is what we say when we’re afraid we don’t know how to make that effort, or when it feels too hard.
                Last month I helped move some heavy bookshelves out of my brother’s house. Shuffling along, backwards, trying not to scrape the top on the door or the bottom on the floor, my knees and toes knocking into the side, I thought about awkward. Following Baudelaire, maybe awkward is when our messiness shows, our not-good-at-this. We’re so used to trying to broadcast our talent. Understood that way, awkward is a kind of failing: if we had a dolly, or I was better at lifting things, we’d’ve danced those shelves along with grace and aplomb. understood that way, I can try to be better, or else stick to where I “fit.” Up in the sky, the albatross is a “rider of winds.” It’s only down here walking that he looks so weak.
                But then there’s Gay, and his awkward is part of the rush of his gratitude. It’s the silliness of bouncing knees when I’m running or the jumble of knees when I trip, it’s the way I spit (like he spits) when he gets really excited in talking. It’s the goofy ways we grin at each other. It’s not something to be avoided, because the truth is, fumbling along and bouncing into things and trying, I really liked helping to move that bookshelf.

                “I’m still thanking all the stars, one by one.” -Marissa Meyer, Winter

                Somewhere in my early twenties, I started spending a few minutes every day writing a list of what I was grateful for in that moment. I’ve heard it called a gratitude journal. It’s been a couple years since I really continued that practice, but for this next month, I’m going to pick it back up. Here’s my first entry.

                I’m grateful for the cold air that seeped in to the room where I was sleeping, late last night. And for my blanket. I’m grateful for the sound of a dog’s footsteps this morning, quiet and curious in their exploring. I’m grateful for my nieces and all their curiosity, their determination in being themselves, their joy in running. I’m grateful for the breakfast I haven’t eaten yet. 
                I’m grateful to have so much time this summer with my family, and for the friendships that span years, sometimes as thin as threads of I-miss-you and sometimes as thick as forests we wander through. I’m grateful for blowing my nose. It’s so much fun. And then I get to breathe. I’m grateful for dirt beneath my feet and rock beneath the dirt, holding it up into ridges in the nearby park where I’ve been walking, and for roots through the dirt lifting up branches and grass. It’s been hot in California, and I’m really, really grateful for water. I’m grateful for shade. And sun. I’m grateful, when I lift up my eyes, for all the openness between me and what I see, and for the closeness. And in a very real way I’m grateful for you, too. This moment of reaching.

                “[An academic education will] begin to give you an idea what size mind you have.” -Mr. Antolini in JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye

                “Can I interest you in everything, all of the time?” -Bo Burnham, “The Internet,” Inside

                Lately I’ve been thinking about the size of my thoughts. Sometimes I get trapped going around and around one detail. When I was fifteen and lost my favorite pencil, I’d stomp around the house, somehow sure that I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else until I’d found it. Sometimes I get trapped in the largeness of things: in how much is wrong with our education systems, for instance, and the apparent impossibility of trying to help. In bouncing back and forth between magnifying glass thoughts and beyond-the-ocean thoughts, I used to wonder what the “right” scope for me would be. By “right,” I guess I meant the one that would help me understand more. And the one that would feel better. Did I need a wider lens? Or a narrower one?
                In the last few weeks, instead of looking for the “right” one, I’ve been paying attention to where I feel drawn in different moments. Sometimes I want to zoom in. A jeweler once told me how, when he stared through his magnifying lenses, the little space of a ring became a whole world he could step into. I’ve felt that kind of engagement. It’s lovely. I fall in: to one sensation, one leaf, one line of poetry. Other times I lie on my back, looking up at the sky, and the sense of all this going on and on carries me out with it. It’s breathtaking. If the real threat in Burnham’s line is the last part, “all of the time,” then I can always ask about now. When the field’s too big, I can pick a little patch of grass, a sip of shade, to sit in. When that’s too small I can walk or look up.
                Can I hear where you’re looking, just for right now?

                Spoiler alert: you might want to go watch Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi (Swahili: “breath”) for yourself before listening to me rave about it. It’s a 20 minute science fiction short, and it might have one of the coolest, quietest twists I’ve seen in a long time.
                If you watch sci fi the set up might feel familiar. Sometime in the future the world is dying. Humans live in small, locked-down communities with water as their most precious resource. People take “Dream Suppressants.” Outside is only empty wastelands and garbage and radiation and dry dust. The last trees are gone. In that world we follow Asha, the curator of her settlement’s Virtual Natural History Museum. When she receives a sample of soil that seems, contrary to everything she’s been told, capable of growing new life, she goes out to find where the soil came from and plant the last seed from her museum. In the end, far out past exhaustion, she gives that seed the last of her drinking water and curls up around where it’s planted. As the camera pulls back, we watch from above as the tree grows, its branches reaching out.
                And then we get the last twenty seconds. The camera keeps pulling back, and we see that the tree Asha planted is a few dunes away from a stand of trees. A stand of trees that is actually a forest, a giant forest, thicker and thicker as the camera keeps pulling back. The last sound we hear is the beginning of a thunderstorm. We watched that first seed grow in rapid time, so you could read the end as suggesting that Asha’s tree seeded a new forest. But I don’t think so. The tree she planted is separate from the others, and we don’t see the forest starting. We see that it already is. That means that this isn’t a story about a hero saving the day. By dreaming, by going out past her walls and sharing the water she had, Asha didn’t “fix” anything. The forest was there. The rainstorm was there. Her courage, her willingness to share what she has, is how we get to join them—like how we join the sky, for a moment, every time we breathe.

“and friends this is the realest place I know,
it makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful […]”
                -Ross Gay, from “Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude”

“I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.”
                -Richard Wilbur, from “The Writer”

                The realest place I know, Gay writes, and I realize that some of the moments that seem the most important, the move lived—the most loving—are the moments when the truth of something overflows past itself. Warm stone beneath my feet. A finger of dark winter wind. A nod from a friend. It makes me squirm like a worm I am so grateful. Sometimes I wonder about the different things I want. A different place to stay. A different routine. A plan for next year. Those wants are real, but there’s another question. What of this do I want? More fully, more wholly, muscles tensing and relaxing with the attention of touch—what of this?
                I want to be here, laughing and working and cooking and sitting with my family. I want to write this, listening to Ross Gay and Richard Wilbur and all the countless others I think about whenever I wonder after something. I want the softness of the bed I’m laying on. I want the reach of trying to understand, or perhaps connect, and the relaxation (soon) of rolling over and going to sleep.
                I wish what I wished you before, but harder. Maybe the moments of peace, inspiration, and connection that I feel aren’t so different from the moments of grey distance. Maybe they’re simply a halfstep more themselves. A dancestep more grateful. A steady step. Here. And friends, this is the realest place I know.

                “Do artworks keep evolving, acquiring new meanings, even after leaving the artist’s studio?”
                “They do. Threat, an interactive installation in which viewers are invited to take a soap away each, was a response to a growing fear of otherness. Currently, as it sits on a street in Copenhagen, inhabiting a shipping container, it opens up conversations around anxiety owing to migration into Europe on the one hand, and a double take, on the other, with the current situation where we’ve become suspicious of almost everyone.”
                -from a 2020 interview with artist Shilpa Gupta

                One of the funny things I’ve done in a classroom is try to teach the same course. I’ve started one year’s version of Writing Poetry with maxims from La Rochefoucauld, and then because it went well I’ve started the next year’s Writing Poetry with those same maxims. As though I could carry along a sequence, a syllabus, from year to year. It’s wonderful how close a thought from hundreds of years ago can feel. At the same time, that thought lands differently in 2015 and 2018. Shilpa Gupta is showing me why. We don’t read the ink of a letter. We read the ink and the space around it.
                I imagine myself carrying along a ruler, holding it up to things while I try to make sense of the world.  Aha, this piece of driftwood is one foot long. This stone is one foot wide. This lamp shade is one foot high. But now I have this image of the ruler shifting in my hand. Anything that I actually return to feels different, is different, each time I go back. Maybe we carry things not just because they stay the same, but because they change. When I think about the books and the ideas that really, really mean something to me, they mean something by growing, by becoming, by being different. Star Wars doesn’t mean to me what it did when I was sixteen. It still means something. What if rulers function, not just by holding true and helping us measure, but also by warping? By hinting to us about how we’ve been trying to measure—by bobbing as they float on the ripples of a changing current?

“Listen, listen, a lesser voice,
a whisper of the wind on stone
along the river’s drouth-white bed,
the shadow of the word unsaid.”
                -Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Talk Shows”

                Lately I’ve noticed myself feeling quiet. And I’ve noticed that, with how often I look for meaning through words, I’ve tried to find words for my quiet. I’ve looked for a story to explain my storyless-ness. Words and sentences are what I turn to first when I’m trying to work something out, when I’m trying to build a stage where a voice can speak. What about when the speaker isn’t a speaker, and doesn’t want to say anything at all.
                Listen. Listen. Or maybe we can even go past listening, and sit with the sky and the dry riverbed instead of the river. Before I left Illinois, I went for a long walk with a good friend. We watched birds. We talked. We sat in a meadow. I have this image of my mind as a high plateau. Along the edge of it, on those down slopes, is where I channel water into whatever work I try to do. It’s where I gather momentum toward projects and ideas. Up on the plateau is sky and earth. Rain, sometimes. None of it has a purpose yet. I described that to my friend, and said I wanted to spend more time letting the water gather. That way, later, I would have something to direct. My friend said that sounded nice, but they added it didn’t need to be that way. Maybe there would be water. Maybe there would be sun. And all this, this here, there already was.
                The first time I wrote this, I tried ending with describing something we sat with in that meadow. Then I tried asking you for something—a glimpse of what you’re sitting with. But that’s me looking for words again. Maybe you don’t need to tell me. Maybe we’ll just sit.

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
                -T. S. Eliot, from “Little Gidding”

                I’m back near where I grew up. It’s lovely. Today I was back in Annadel State Park, back in the rolling golden hills, back beneath moss covered oaks. Watching a woodpecker. Yesterday I was back with a dear friend, back sitting on the floor together, reading poetry together from a book we found together years and years ago. On Sunday I was back at the coast, back watching the horizon hatch into sea and sky. Back with family. Back on roads I remember, the ones that lead up to the hills, to a creek and plum trees and back home.
                I used to focus on the last bit of that passage from T. S. Eliot. And know the place for the first time. Now I find myself focusing on the line before that—to arrive where we started. To come back. It feels so sweet to come back. I’m not sure if I know all this any more, but there’s a softness, a joy, to arriving at the hills I’ve walked so many times, to sitting next to someone I’ve loved for so long, to feeling a bit of wind, new-old, blowing.

                “This sculpture may entertain the eye but is meant to be felt and touched. […] [It is a] participatory device one uses to “sculpt” a series of tactile sensations with someone else.”
                -Pedro Reyes, in describing his artwork “Cuerpomatico”

                It’s getting hot in Illinois. Earlier today I went off for a last few errands before flying out to visit family tomorrow morning. As I drove, windows open, I worried about this post. There were a number of ideas I’ve been playing with, but none of them felt quite ready. Sitting at a stoplight I searched back through my ideas, shuffling them like cards, disliking each image. And then a few fingers of the afternoon breeze slipped through my open window and brushed past my arm.
                I spend so much time thinking about the world. And to go along with thinking, I spend so much time looking: at my computer screen while I type, at pages while I read, up into a tree when I hear a squirrel but can’t quite see where it is. Reyes’ sculpture brings me out of my eyes and back to my fingertips, my arms. My toes on the carpet. My elbows on the desk. But it’s not just for me: the sculpture’s something two people might do together. You could roll a ball up your friend’s arm, and then trace around their wrist with the wooden propeller. The first time I hugged someone after a long period of sheltering in place alone, I remember something that felt like, yes. This. That’s a little like what happened with the breeze at the stoplight. This. Maybe that’s what happens when, reminded by skies or friends, we go back to the way we’re always touching and being touched by the world.

Silent Creeper
Touchy and firm
Your angelic smile
Comes to my Island
Lies upon my horizon
                -from “Sunset,” by Eva Lingairi, published in Mi Mere: Poetry and Prose by Solomon Islands Women Writers

                This poem gives me back its words, but they’re new, and awash in seawater. I’ve always heard “touchy” as a bad thing. Oversensitive. Easy to offend. I think Eva Lingairi means touchy like related to touch: the sunset on the horizon, the last sips of light on the water, on the sand, on her. Her feet on the island, and her poem brushing past me.
                I’m so grateful to have a touchy world. In these last months, in harder moments, I’ve lay down on the floor, running my fingers over the carpet. In light movements I’ve walked barefoot on grass, opened my hands to sunlight. I imagine Lingairi might have done something similar: held the last bit of the day as it held her. “Touchy” came to mean touchy, how we use it, because we blurred words together: etymonline suggests “tetchy” and Shakespeare’s “teachie” were influenced by the familiar “touch,” and here we are. But what if brushing past each other—being aware of brushing past each other—wasn’t framed as an aggravating thing. What if it was angelic, what if it was sweet, what if it was sunset and the island.
                I’m going outside to hold a leaf. A rock. It’s sunset where I am, which feels like a gift Lingairi’s giving. So there are a last few sips of light, and then there’ll be the softness of twilight and the dark.