“Perhaps humankind was powerless, or nearly so, in the face of the mind’s eagerness to make everything mean, to turn the world into a personal network of symbols.”
                -Alex Shakar, Luminarium

                A little while ago I was happy for a few days. Whistling happy: happy like in a movie where you step up on a park bench and spin. Once I realized what I’d been feeling, I wondered, why? What trick had I learned? Was I going to sleep earlier? Or later? Maybe I was staying hydrated? Maybe I was thinking about myself, my work, or the world differently? 
                In Shakespeare in Love, young William spins around and spits over his shoulder before, triumphantly, he begins to write. It’s his talisman, his way of summoning genius. For years I wondered what my spin-and-spit routine would be. Whatever it was, the habit would make things easy, make everything fall into place. Spin and spit and you’re Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s in love. I don’t think that’s how it really works.
                I do make patterns. I turn the world into a network of symbols that makes sense. Sometimes that’s useful—I’m not going to lean out of my car and ask the guy hanging on his horn whether he means he’s angry or if he’s just happy to be alive. I’m going to see the pattern, and guess. At the same time, I have this growing suspicion that many of the patterns I impose on what’s around me are silly. I have this suspicion my patterns leave a lot out. In my example before, I was sleeping, I was staying hydrated, I was connecting with people, but I don’t think I can arrange those elements into some blueprint that will always “work.” I’m trying to “make everything mean,” as Shakar says, to make every step the necessary result of what had come before. The world, meanwhile, is dancing: chaotic, quiet, changeable, quickening, varied, loud.

                “So much of my early years in skating weren’t about skating at all. They were only about Barbara.”
                -Tillie Walden, Spinning

                I’m not sure what anything’s about. Growing up, backpacking was about the mountains, about the beauty of rock and water (we were often above the tree line). It was also about family: about lying on a rock next to my brother, shivering after we’d jumped into an ice melt lake. About wading across a creek with my mom. About picking the perfect campsite with my dad. It was about quiet, and it was about all the sounds you hear outside. It was about stepping away from my friends and the social rules I usually moved through, and it was about coming back to those friends again.
                Tillie Walden skated, in part, because it was through skating that she’d met an adult (a coach) who held her and cared about her. I’ve seen that story many times: I had a group of students who loved their own version of “mini basketball,” but I’ll bet you what they really loved is each other. I had a varsity golfer who golfed because of his grandfather, a basketball player who played because of her mom, a violinist who was singing for her siblings. So much of skating isn’t about skating at all.
                I think there’s a warning in all this: we should be careful what languages we ask children to learn, to speak, in order to hear us say I love you. I think there’s also a chance: not necessarily to get to the bottom of things, as I’m not sure there always is a single coherent “why” to uncover, but to at least to sink down into them. Lately I’ve been saying “I just miss being around people.” And that’s true. But it’s not simply, easily true, because being around people isn’t just about being around people. It’s about feeling seen, about getting to share myself. It’s about getting to be quiet and not attached to a computer, and still be close to someone. It’s about getting to ignore each other and still being there. It’s about touch, and laughter, and a challenge to my expectations that pulls me out of my thoughts, and a kind of support that makes me feel at home in my head. At 25 I would’ve said that we should only go after the main thing we’re after, the real thing we’re after, but I’m not sure that’s possible. Maybe it is. Maybe, instead, I can be careful about what languages I ask others to use before I pay attention to them, and I can weave myself into my own messiness. Rock and water, family and solitude, leaving and coming back: these years are about so much.

                “It was the first time I remember our coach had no control over us. It felt so good to scream. […] I could still hear the rain pounding relentlessly on the roof of the rink and I couldn’t help but smile. ”
                -Tillie Walden, Spinning

                I used to write as a release, a leap, a shout of joy or discovery. I didn’t know where I was: others’ excitements and sadnesses, the threat of how we were hurting the world, the possibilities of a creek and a tree and a friend—all those wrapped around me, and I didn’t know how to stand inside them. I wrote to ground down. I wrote, like Walden, to scream and hear. If I had a little room that was my mind as I usually lived in it, my interpretation of the world as I usually shaped it, then writing was opening a window to feel the wind. Sometimes it was even opening a door: it was an effort toward going out, toward meeting. I’m not the first to use writing that way: Le Guin wrote to be “on all sides exposed, / unfortressed, undefended, / inviolable, vulnerable, alive.”
                The funny thing is, in “focusing more on my writing,”  I think I’ve largely taken that kind of writing away from myself. I didn’t mean to. Then again, so much of what I write now fits into an intended framework. I’m working on a novel. There are chapters. They go together in certain ways, and I write pieces to perform certain functions. I do something similar with my habits, my work: make the deadlines. Do laundry on Thursdays. Stretch before bed. And that’s good. The tasks need to be done, and an awareness for coherence, for pieces coming together into a whole, might be part of growing up. But I also want to remember that other kind of writing, of being, of breaking open.
                Walden’s memoir ends when the strict, controlled world of synchronized skating is shaken open by a thunderstorm. “Our coach had no control over us.” The accepted structure is swept away by something bright and real. I started writing as a way to reach out toward wonder, toward wider and deeper. At the very end of Walden’s memoir, listening to the storm, she smiles. Here is rain, unplanned for, undirected: rain pounding down against my little expectation of “all there is.” Rain washing out to new seeds, rain drumming, so close I can’t help but feel its connection.

                “Everyone I know has been making me crazy. Being around someone who doesn’t…who isn’t…it sounds all right.”
                Tillie Walden, Are You Listening? 

                In one of my older memories, I come into a room because I hear my mother crying. I ask what I’ve already learned to ask when people cry:
                “Are you okay?”
                She nods, smiles through her tears. “I’m sad.”
                “I’m sorry,” I say.
                “It’s okay. It’s okay to be sad.”
                Twenty-four or twenty five years later, and I’m still trying to learn that lesson. Maybe that’s because lots of other sources taught me it wasn’t okay (I know plenty of adults with rules like “no crying”), and maybe it’s because, as a culture, I think we often do relationships by restriction. We set up invisible requirements that you’ll show this part of yourself, but not that one; you’ll be one side of you, but not another. I think we do the same thing in a lot of our art: a friend and I were recently talking about Half World, a young adult book that acknowledges alcoholism, cutting, and other “adult” topics. “Wait,” joked my friend, “But isn’t it better to ignore those things, and treat anyone who interacts with them or talks about them as evil?”
                I wonder if this is what Tillie Walden’s character is pushing against. It’s an issue of being known when being known is a kind of limitation: you’re the funny one, the smart one, the artsy one. You’re the mechanic or the lawyer. You’re a specific role, and this kind of knowing expects you to keep to it. I wonder if we can know each other in a kinder, wider way.
                When I write, there is so much I have trouble approaching. When I talk to people, there is so much I have trouble revealing. Without meaning to, I’ve put these restrictions on those I care for. But I don’t want to. Sometimes I might need to step away from my friends, just like Walden says; I wonder if, even more, I need to step away from a kind of knowing, a kind of imagined being, that tells us all to be what I’ve expected. I wonder if we can grow close to each other and “know” each other as mysteries.

                “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
                -Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (“influenced by Zen Buddhist theory on joy and impermanence, as echoed by Max Ritvo,” Vuong notes).

                I’m working on a revision of my novel. For a little while, things were positively jiving. (I’m not sure if the slang there means the excited, energetic confluence of movements and thoughts I mean, but it sounds like it should). The book’s world felt real. I cared about it. I cared about the people, their struggles and hopes. And then a breath, a look around—and I couldn’t seem to pick the story back up. I couldn’t find the thread that had been leading me through this particular labyrinth. I haven’t really worked on it since Saturday night, and then I was almost flying.
                “Haven’t you ever had writer’s block?” asked a friend of mine.
                Well, maybe, but I don’t think that’s what this is. I’m stuck because I was flying Saturday night. I’m stuck where Ocean Vuong says we can get stuck, and it’s not something I just do in writing. I’m not working on my novel because I’m worried I’ll mess it up: I like what I did with the first chapters, and because I do, I’m worried that what I do here with Chapter 7 will ruin things. I’m worried I was inspired, and now I’m not; I had it, and now I don’t. I’ve done the same thing with friendships, losing something that might have been (for a while) because I realize I’m leaving, I’m moving away, and “What will it be, really, when I can’t hold onto it?”
                “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
                It will be what it is.
                Desperation is the right word. I’ve been fumbling, clutching and reaching, looking for the totally solid point to stand on, looking for the unmistakable golden path of inspiration. There isn’t one. I don’t think I need one. 
                “Too much joy.”
                There is. Here. Not only joy, but still: joy in every movement, every step. I have a friend who asks “What made you smile today?” instead of the more common “How are you?” The last time she said it, I grabbed at my memory, looking for the perfect sweet moment. I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to say nothing. And then, Ocean in my mind, I looked back over the same day. The phone calls and the work. The struggles, connections, and sips of cool water. So much, so much, so much when I’m not desperate to keep it.

                “Kehinde had stories for everyone and everything except the dead man.”
                -Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic For Small Change

                It’s her lost beloved who’s near Kehinde’s heartbreak, but she has stories for everything else.
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: for a long time now, I’ve been wanting to write a story with a father and a son. The son is slipping away into frustration and confusion, into his own mental recreation of everything that’s wrong. The father listens to the hurt, the family cat twining between his feet. He listens quietly. When his son pauses he gently picks up the cat, scratches it behind the ears, and steps forward to rest it on his son’s lap. The creature curls up.
                “What?” says the son, looking at his father’s silence.
                “Pet the cat.”
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: I’ve set up my life to be far away from people I love. It’s hard not to do that, these days, with how things go—even if I lived near my family (and I hope to, sometime soon), I’d be far from my closest friends. They all live in different places. There’s a sadness in that, in visiting, but leaving is also tinged with its own kind of joy. The night before a flight, before saying goodbye, I feel a push to say what I most mean: to open and be honest. I won’t see them for a while, which reminds me, whether we’re sitting side by side or walking out beneath the trees, to see them now. To let myself be seen.
                Here’s what I don’t mean to say: when I have something really important to tell you about myself, when a hurt or a hope is tying me up so I don’t know how to see, I sometimes write a story or a poem or a scrap of description. It usually doesn’t mention me: it sees a city in a snowstorm or the ocean an hour after the sun’s gone down. Or a boy, a father, and a cat. But showing you that poem, that story, that scrap of description is often a clearer window into what’s going on for me than the other windows I know how to build.
                Maybe one of the things we need art for is to tell all the stories except the story, to fill in negative space with color and narrative, movement and sound, until we get to the silence, the end of the last page. Just passed that is where we are. Where we need to be, and where, passed itself, our art can bring us.

                “For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says “You are here.””
                -Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

                I remember, at 16, standing just above Piute Pass in the High Sierras and staring out at the clouds and the sky and the scattered rock of Humphreys Basin. Lakes slept among the low ridges like curled deer, and above us clouds went like an endless fleet, their pink hulls sailing toward a dimming sunset. When I remember it, sometimes, I see a tiny figure in the corner of the image, a boy of 16, trying to feel the wonder all around him by imagining sleeping deer and sailing ships.
                Adams is joking, he’s playing, he’s off and running and hard to pin down. But I don’t think I believe his machine. The Vortex gives you a glimpse of everything, the whole cosmos, with a little marker labeled “You are here.” In Restaurant, that kills you: you can’t survive seeing your smallness amidst this vastness, can’t survive having a true “sense of proportion.” The only character to survive is Zaphod, and then only because he’s in an alternate universe that was created just for him. Because, in all the vastness of that alternate universe, he’s the most important thing. I wonder if Adams has it backwards: if the weight of being the because for all that would crush you. Even if importance is one way to survive, I don’t think it’s the only one. I don’t think it’s the one I’ll look for.
                I spend plenty of time trying to be big. When I do, that effort on my part often pushes people out—there can only be one Most Important Thing in Zaphod’s alternate universe. It tends to push me out, too: I’m too busy with the posing. I’ll practice, instead, being small, being part of things, being awash in all of this. In fifteen years I haven’t finished feeling the view from one mountain pass. In revising this, and trying to figure out what exactly I wanted to say, I mentioned my ideas to a friend.
                “Of course,” she said.
                And with that, simply, there I was, next to a friend and surrounded by all this.

                “If you take ‘mortality’ as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then ‘immortality’ is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you’ll be…” -Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake

                You’ll be immortal, at least by Crake’s definition.
                I spend a lot of time in my definitions. “Productive.” “Happy.” “Kind.” “Responsible.” It’s hard to know where else to be: when I walk into a room, I usually use one of the gaps I call a door, and I sit on one of the constructions I call a chair, even though philosophers (being awesome) have argued this out, questioning whether I can really define either category. I’ve had the argument: I couldn’t. Not knowing exactly where to put the boundaries for “chair” (can a stone be a chair? How about an indent in the wall? How sloped can the seat be—40°? 50°?) can feel like a gimmick, like well I can’t find the right words right now but I’m sure they’re out there, until suddenly it feels like something more. My definitions, the spaces I move through and stay in, are pretty shaky: my patterns help me along, help me choose directions and recognize similarities, but they also hide connections, overemphasize characteristics, blind me to another kind of “obvious.”And of course, my definitions could be otherwise.
                “Immortal” is a “not-” definition. I wonder if we often turn to that trick when we’re not sure exactly what we mean. We mean something different from dying, from what we think we’re experiencing now. What we mean follows from our imagination of ourselves, our conception of what we are and what we wish we could be. Immortal. In Atwood’s book, Crake creates a kind of almost-human who will live healthily, without aging or lessening, until one day when its rigged ‘biological clock’ will click over to dead. These creatures will never think of their own being, or their own ending; they’ll never be afraid. Isn’t that, he asks, what we meant?
                Reading Atwood, and living through these strange times, I wonder which other places to sit. I wonder which other ways to talk. I wonder which of my definitions I want to radically (celebratorily? Wildly? Whimsically? Wonderfully? Wanderfully?) redefine. The usual list comes up: “success” (a word I’ve always hated; one succeeds at clear tasks, at production, but when did we decide one could ‘succeed’ at life), “happiness,” “love,” “work,” “freedom,” “responsibility,” “safety,” “duty,” “worth,” “self worth.” Redefining any of these is hard. Redefining any of these is a door, or what might be a door, or a gap between two trees, and on the other side—well, it’s hard to see from here, isn’t it?

                “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” -Arundhati Roy, War Talk

                Does anyone else ever look back at past versions of themselves, and wonder, “wow”? Fourteen—that might have been the year in which I thought I knew the most, or at least, the year when I thought I would figure out my questions, find answers, and be able to share them. And long before that—five?—looking at tadpoles, entranced and bored at the same time, and when we’d catch a few and bring them back to the tank at home, I’d forget about them in all the other brightnesses of the world until I suddenly saw their new little legs. And then I’d stare, watch, want to see how it had happened, but it had already happened.
                I hear people asking if the world could be different. When I watch a certain way, that’s what my Facebook feed looks like: a series of how did this happen, a series of look where we are, a series of how does this change. Could we have different systems for safety, education, incarceration, elections, housing, wealth? Could we? I love how Arundhati Roy flips the question around in her answer We can’t not. It will be different (it is different) though we might not know how, though how will grow from what we do now. Listen, and you can hear her breathing.
                In my ten years of teaching, I’ve seen conversations spiral in and out from one central thought: “the way it is” is not the way it is. This, what we’re doing, is one way: one changing moment in one bouncing creek in one cultural landscape fueled by the rains of one set of circumstances. This is not forever: it’s only now for a moment. Perhaps it’s easier to see that through oneself: I’m not the thirteen year old, lost in Huckleberry Finn, and I’m not the 25 year old in Oklahoma, and the last months have been an intense spring/summer seminar in how staying is not staying the same. I want to see that in myself, to be open to the breathing, and I want to see that when I look around me, too.
                Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, can’t you hear her breathing?

                “The reason for your complaint, it seems to me, is the constraint which your intellect imposes upon your imagination….you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.”
                -Friedrich Schiller to a friend with “writer’s block,” as quoted by Alison Bechdel 

                For the last month I’ve walked around a little apartment complex pond almost every day. It’s not, you might say, a particularly nice pond: it’s surrounded by buildings and edged in a little cinderblock wall that’s fallen away in two places. Sometimes I walk around it, snapping through my To Do list in my head and probably on my phone, and never see much. Never feel very there. Other times—well, ducks have started sleeping in one of the wall’s gaps, and muskrats dug a den in the other. At night the water looks black like the inlet of some dark sea, or else like itself, the weight of dense sun-happy weeds catching ripples from flickering fish. When the wind’s down, the surface and the sky play back and forth, mirroring each other, and when it’s up, the surface shimmers apart the buildings and trees and clouds. Sometimes I’m swept away.
                Schiller is talking to his friend about writer’s block, about the trap of rejecting sentences and pages as not good enough before they have a chance to breathe. But I think it goes far past having trouble writing. Bechdel finds Schiller’s line in Freud, who uses it to explain free association. The twitch from the surface down into the weeds, a muskrat diving, except this muskrat-of-our-minds doesn’t stay in the pond. It moves from aches to a memory of apples, from lips to the taste of sour cream to a dinner cooked once over an open fire, my family sitting in a loose circle and watching the sky more than each other. Maybe we free-associate ourselves: ripple to the thoughts and connections that land like dry leaves in the water of our pond. The leaves float, sink, deepen to mulch. Or at least, we can let ourselves do that. It’s through the quiet decaying collection of all these many things that a pond makes rich soil. We can garden, too, can order our thoughts, trim our aggressions and prejudices, plant a new perspective. But playing Schiller’s line back and forth in my head, I wonder if we ground down into the earth of where we are and what we are more through our imaginations, through the image of all this, than through our intellects.
                That’s what I think. What I want is to let things be, and to be in them, to stop pulling myself away from one place toward another that’s supposed to be better. And Schiller suggests the force that holds us back: the beatings of that measuring stick that make if and maybe and look curl up and hide. Is this good enough? Do I have time for it? 
                I wish I could describe where you are: the end table, maybe, with three books and an old glass of water, or your phone with its cracked screen (see how the cracks hold strings of changing color?), or the sky outside. Is it all the colors that we define to grey? Is it bright? Raining?
                Imagination, subconscious, the weeds and the rain. A duck sleeping, head to wings, and one eye shifts open. A muskrat trailing bubbles as it swims.