“Is this something that’s real for you, something that resonates in your heart, or is it just an opportunity?” -Professor Howell Chickering, at his home when I visited in ‘15

                Lately I find myself grasping at straws. Then again, that might not be lately: at Amherst, I remember talking with a friend about how I used homework to justify a day—if I’d written something or read something assigned, then at least I’d done something. (“Yeah,” my friend said, in a way that made it clear he’d done the same thing; then he added, “But I’m trying not to do that”). These days I want to learn something, study something, make something—prove something, really; anything; anything to ‘get through the day,’ to ‘make this time productive.’ I think that’s a misguided (and a misguiding) impulse.
                “Is this just an opportunity,” asked Chickering.
                Until then, I’d never heard “just an opportunity.” I think I believed, dimly, that in the struggle to learn, to become, to create—and of course, to get ahead—you took whatever secret doors you found. Life was Chutes and Ladders: if you were lucky enough to find a chute, you took it. I had just been told about a box with letters from Edith Wharton that had never been studied, one of those things passed down in a family. I could study them. As a student who’d loved my time at Amherst, as a twenty-something who wanted to go back to grad school, but didn’t know how to make that work, I thought it might be a dream come true. All the same, something didn’t feel right. Chickering reminded me that it matters what you dream, that you probably have lots of dreams, and some of them are passing flights of fancy while some of them are choices you might decide to make, again and again. I said “chutes” before, but picturing the board, it’s actually ladders that helped you. Maybe there’s something telling in my slip: and of course, outside of the game with its clearly imposed endpoint, you have to decide where you’re going.
                Too often, I’ve gotten myself mixed up and exhausted by clutching at whatever ladder seemed close to hand, by trying to bump through every door. I don’t mean that I want to be sure of the opportunities I pick: I’m not sure I ever will be. But I’m tired of fumbling for this or that “achievement” to show something. I want to practice pausing. I want to remember what Chickering said, not as a question, but as a place to be: a place where thoughts gather like water, where currents still, and perhaps eventually the pool overflows towards something that might be its own downstream.
                There are the opportunities, and there’s what’s real for you, what resonates with your heart.

                “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.”
                -Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

                Months ago I stepped into a room, and somehow, for a moment, I just saw the space. The breath of light and air that held beneath the ceiling. Beautiful. When I was a kid washing dishes, I would fill up this one glass vase and swirl my fingers through the little cool currents. Standing there, looking at the openness in front of me, it seemed I could feel space itself swirling the same way water did all those years ago. The same way water still does, of course, though often I don’t see it. 
                A year ago, or more, I was outside and looked up at the open space between me and the trees at the other end of a field. There was so much of it, so much depth: a world wider than the little brain in which I do my thinking. So much openness, so much fullness. Looking into it was like discovering a fairytale cave. Sometimes it’s hard for me to see the space outside: with no roof, no wall restricting my sight, it’s harder to notice the reach that goes out in all directions. I often feel the height of a skyscraper, whether I’m looking up or down, but I don’t often feel the depth of the sky. I think I have before. I probably fell over.
                I never studied architecture, but sometimes I think we build cathedrals, build vaulted spaces of air and light, to cut off a little piece of infinity and so give our minds a sense for size. In St. Petersburg, Russia, I walked into a public square and stopped, dwarfed by the city—exactly as I was supposed to be, said a local poet. Sometimes, instead, I imagine all our endless roads and heavy cement, I imagine the earth, the weight of its mantle, the heat of its sleep: I imagine the earth shifting, rolling over to yawn, our roads less than cobwebs on its skin. Maybe my cobweb image and my view of cathedrals are both a way to practice. I like both, anyway. I’ll keep practicing, or keep forgetting, and hope that sometime soon I’ll look up and see the trees, the field, the depth in front of me.

                “But how am I to know the good side from the bad?”
                “You will know when you are calm. At peace. Passive.”
                                -Yoda

                Three pictures: when I trained Aikido, I once asked Tetsutaka Sugawara Sensei where I was supposed to focus my eyes. I don’t remember his answer. I do remember him looking at me for a long moment. I remember watching him later that day, his face that gave nothing away while he trained and then warmed with a smile, his quiet eyes, wondering how he saw so much. I remember realizing I might have asked the wrong question.
                Dr. Gordon Neufeld says a mature mind can bring everything together, all the conflicting voices and perspectives, and find balance in the tension. The trick is learning to hold a large enough space. The trick it to hear the different sides—this, what I’m writing, isn’t good enough; a blog is a vanity project anyway; I like writing these; go back to the idea, before it slips away; I love the sound of the rain—without letting one of them drown out the others.
                I just came back from a walk. It’s windy out, and the trees are budding, red and purple and white. A little girl rode a bike, wobbly and smiling, her father cheering her on until he called her back. In the last month, I’ve found myself saying more or less the same thing when people asked how I was doing: “I’m alternating between feeling pretty good and feeling very overwhelmed, but I’m trying to be kind as I go back and forth.” Sometimes I add I’m grateful, I’m spending more time looking out the window, I’m scared. As the weeks go by and my answer stays similar, I’ve started wondering if I’m stuck. It seems silly, saying the same thing, again and again. Walking today it didn’t feel silly. It felt like, bit by bit, I was opening a larger space. I’m raising the tent beneath which I can be all of that at once.
                You will know when you are calm.
                I have this idea that Sugawara Sensei saw what I meant, saw what I was holding to—a world with just one rule, maybe: this way, or that way—and saw that I wasn’t ready to let go. So he let me watch his own careful look. He left me with that look, so I could keep wondering, so that,  a long time later, I might wonder into a walk through budding trees. 
                As peace. Passive. 
                Starting to realize the open space of all that is.

                “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
                -Blaise Pascal, Pensees 139 (translated by W. F. Trotter)

                It’s hard to sit still lately, isn’t it? Is that just me? It’s hard to concentrate, too—one writer in my graduate program said that writing his stories feels “silly” with everything that’s going on, and a professor commented that she can play hours of Animal Crossing, but can’t seem to start any of the very good books she’d ordered. Among those of us privileged and lucky enough to stay home, there’s something funny going on. Another friend pointed out those people who are busy on social media, proving how productive they are—he thought they could go ahead and shut up about themselves.
                And then, yesterday, I lay down in the grass. And I don’t mean that I escaped the crush and the silly and all the rest: I most certainly didn’t. For the first long time at the park, I was playing Wizards Unite. I was playing as I lay in the grass. I was playing as I walked. There was a goal, and I was going to get to it. And then, in a pause, there was the wind, cold as it slipped around my fingers, and sunlight, warm on one side of my face, and shadow, cool on the other.
                In the rest of Pensees 139, Pascal says he’s discovered why people avoid their own quiet room: it’s because we’re all going to die, and it shakes us to think about that, so we have to run around distracting ourselves. It’s because everything we built is going to pass away, we’re going, necessarily, to lose everything, and so our “mortal condition” is so “miserable” that we can’t bear to think of ourselves. So, you know: Pascal, always an upper.
                But the sunlight, and the shadow. The carpet beneath my feet. A wave from a neighbor I’ve never talked to, and my wave back. I don’t just mean appreciate the little things. I mean, instead, that it seems our society has been obsessed for a long time with teaching us to distract ourselves from loss and mortality. It seems we won’t let ourselves be still because we’re scared of the big still. So we take, and insist, and build, and yell. We write, and buy, and sell. Pascal pointed out a cage we might have stumbled into. I wonder if right now is asking us, not to find a way out, but to find a way in: our existence is always wound within a place, a time, a certain community. I can imagine this room as a cage. I keep expecting myself to get over my sadness, my confusion, and get back to work. It’s not happening. Perhaps it doesn’t need to. Perhaps I’m turning toward something else. I could imagine, I suppose, the world as a cage, or even the solar system. I’ve done that. I’d like to stop, now. I won’t manage to all at once: the next time I’m uncertain, there will be a voice that says, “Use this time!” There will be a twitch in my hands toward a game or a goal. I’d like to tell that voice, that twitch, “stay here a moment.”
                I wonder how things might look if more of us could sit quietly with ourselves.

                “The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.” -Celeste Ng, “On Leaving Space for the Reader”

                For a little while now I’ve been wondering what I’m doing when I’m “reading.”
                The question finally stood up and waved its arms for attention a few weeks ago. One of my classes explores the stories people tell in science and technology, and a scientist friend came along for our discussion of Randy Olson’s Houston, We Have A Narrative. Understated spoilers: not my favorite book. Olson has picked up some useful tools, he has some good ideas, but he’s like the guy entranced by a hammer who runs around telling you that everything is a nail, and by the way, he’s the master at nails, because look at this: a hammer.
                 If that isn’t a proverbial little legend, dibs. But I’m pretty sure I’m stealing from somewhere.
                After our discussion, my friend said: “Interesting. When I read Houston back in grad school, I thought it was 80% filler, but I just tried to walk around that for the 20% I could use. But you all are talking about everything.” I felt a little “oh no,” somewhere in the back of my head. My professor joined our conversation, offering the term “extractive reading:” reading for what you need. Reading for what you can take away. In her own graduate studies, that became one of my professor’s primary ways of reading, because there was so much to read. My friend agreed: when she read a research paper, she was often looking for the one idea she could use. At that point, I recognized my little quiet “oh no:” it was the realization that I’ve been reading “extractively,” too. I’ve been reading like a mine, like equipment gnawing through earth for ore. Or worse: I’ve reading for the tidbit that backs up my point of view, or for the funny soundbite I can share, or for an uproar quote, or to say, “Oh yeah, I read that.” 
                “You all are talking about everything.” I’m not sure if I lived up to that, but I want to.
                Reading for what you need might not be the worst thing in the world. Sometimes, I’m sure, it’s important. But I remember reading like falling into a lake, reading like falling asleep, reading like waking up. If writers leave a little ambiguous space, I want to be the kind of reader who sometimes goes into that space, who stays there, neck deep in the water or the grass, listening until I realize the silence isn’t silent. Until I hear a beetle buzzing in the air I called empty, or feel subtle currents I’d missed. I don’t want what I’m looking for: I don’t want to take anything. I want to be there with what is, and what was, and what’s becoming. I want to be there, letting the power flow through.

                “Let’s say it’s an antiprediction: If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen. But such wishful thinking cannot be depended on either.” 
                -Margaret Atwood, on whether The Handmaid’s Tale is a prediction

                There’s a rule among white water kayakers: “point positive.” In rapids, the river gets too loud to shout over, so kayakers do a lot of pointing to share information about dangerous things: undercut rocks (if you get swept under one, the current can hold you down and you drown), strainers (same thing), and so on. But if there’s something dangerous on the left side of the river, I’m going to point to the right. I’m going to point where I think you should go. Point positive.
                Dystopian stories—which I’ve often found incredibly powerful, and when I’ve tried to write—do the opposite. They’re warnings. They’re charms against the curses we’re muttering. They’re the opposite of predictions: look at this, see it, so we don’t end up there. That’s a powerful thought, and an important one. The Handmaid’s Tale is still one of my favorite books to teach in high school: I’ve felt, and seen, how it can break open the walls, how it can start a conversation where the real prejudices built into our systems don’t get to stay behind the sheetrock. At the same time, as I watch people trying to respond to COVID-19, I find myself looking for stories that point positive—that show us choosing something better, that give me a different perspective, a different way of conceiving of and ordering reality, so that, in reading, I can see walking a different path. A better path. A path that’s not this doomed capitalistic greedy one we seem so intent on.
                I wonder if Atwood feels something similar. Afterall, she says it’s “wishful thinking” to hope these antipredictions can steer us away from the future they describe. Or maybe we just need, next to these visions, something more wishful. Something more hopeful. Seeing the horror of what we’re headed toward, showing that horror—that warning has power. Warnings make us pull back. But the river’s loud, and it’s hard to hear each other. Once we’re aware of the danger, once we feel the rapid churning, maybe we also need someone on the shore, someone who’s seen the shape of the water and is pointing, hoping, this way.
                Just now, in all this, I want to keep learning how to point positive.

                “Staying silent is like cleaning. You need to sweep away everything that makes a noise in your life. I’ve been doing it for twenty-five years…and I still haven’t finished.” 
                -Zep, A Strange And Beautiful Sound

                I’ve been wondering about this one. At the end of the book, the monk we’ve been following doesn’t find silence: he finds “a strange and beautiful sound.”
                Still, I think there’s something to the cleaning he describes. I’ve been trying to practice stopping lately. It’s harder than I often think. I’ve been trying to practice quiet—trying to let go of the whir and noise I’m so often broadcasting in my head. “Go do this,” “make sure you look like that,” “prove yourself.” Where am I when those sounds go still?
                Years and years ago, a senior at Amherst College and freaking out because I had no idea “what to do with my future,” I talked to a man named B. Alan Wallace. I wanted him to tell me which path was best. He didn’t. Instead he gave me some of the most important, most unexpected advice I’ve ever gotten—advice I’ve written about before. After that, in the end of our Skype call, we looked through our screens to the different skies (which were also the same sky) behind each other. He was in Thailand, I was in Massachusetts. The sun was going down, the sun was coming up. “Beautiful symmetry,” he said.
                I don’t think it’s either the beauty or the symmetry that was important. It was the quiet that let him see both: it was the stillness he invited me into. When I trained in Aikido, we would sweep the mat before and after every class. At first I tried to do it quickly, dramatically: tried to show my mastery with the broom or something like that. Then I saw an older student sweeping.  They did it quietly, carefully. They were sweeping the mat, but they were also sweeping their way toward somewhere. Into something. Into stillness, maybe, although in that stillness there was also movement. The broom. Their steps. The sun, coming up, going down, as the world spins.
                I keep trying to go toward noise. I keep thinking it’s noise that will help me hear something. I’m probably still a beginner sweeper, but that’s okay. It’s okay that, even though I’ve often felt quiet and lost in these last strange weeks, I’m having to practice letting myself get quiet. It’s like cleaning. I’m not finished yet. It takes time to go still, time to move into what is. I keep turning on TV or picking up my phone, as though more noise will help me listen. It might be silence, instead, where we learn to hear this strange and beautiful sound. It might take time, it might take practice. It might take cleaning. And that’s okay.

                This week’s a little different. I’m not starting with a quote, with an author, because I’m hoping some of you will be my authors moving forward. So this week is a request: will you trust me with one of your stories?
                There’s an old idea of the artist as a kind of parent, sending out their immortal children—The Iliad, Macbeth, Moby-Dick—into the world. I understand the wish to make yourself immortal, but I’d rather leave that wish behind. I like art as a place where we meet, as the bridge we pull into existence, a beautiful, surprising, impossible chance, between us. It seems incredible (in the sense of unbelievable) that I can throw an arc of stone from my mind to yours, that you might want it to land, might build the other side of the bridge so that this new path begins. So we can stand on the bridge we’ve made and look down at the water, or up at the sky, and talk to each other. And help. It seems like it shouldn’t be possible, but it is. That’s incredible in another sense, too. Maybe we’re all The Incredibles, stretching out and racing off and holding together so that individuals become communities. Become families.
                “You mean artists as conduits,” a professor told me a few weeks ago when I tried to explain.
                I smiled. “Something like that.”
                I think everyone has a story. I think everyone has something to teach. Over the last years I’ve created a project, Voices, to help build shared spaces where these somethings are heard. Voices weaves together different people’s real stories to give us a glimpse of ourselves and each other, and so pull us together. So far my Voices projects have been grounded in a place, but now I’m going to do one grounded in time. My next project is about right now, about what it’s like to be alive with COVID-19 and physical distancing and all the rest. It’s not about my stories, it’s about yours, so I’m asking: do you want to write down an important moment from your recent life, and share it with me? Want to help build this bridge?
                Here is a page with instructions and a link to share stories. Please feel free to pass it along to others who might be interested.
                Sometimes I don’t know where I’m walking, but the fact that we get to walk together is wonderful.

                “At last I began to think, that is to say to listen harder.” -Samuel Beckett

                Today I feel like I don’t have that much to say. The rain is falling. Cars go past outside. I wonder if I can hear that there are less of them. Hear people staying in, staying home.
                Listen harder.
                Years and years ago, in a rough semester of college, I decided what I needed to do was make my voice heard: speak up, and join the conversation. “The powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse,” says Whitman. Then again, there’s Milton: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”
                Listen harder.
                It was an excited, hopeful, silly thing, my decision in college: or at least, it was only a piece of an idea. Lately, in learning to dance, I’ve found myself enjoying following more than leading. Whichever role I take up, I used to think the challenge was knowing what to do. Now it seems more about hearing what there is. When I watch people who really dance, there’s something—call it the music, call it the beat, call it the world—moving through them. Of course, when I ask them how they do what they do, that’s exactly what they’ve been telling me: “I feel it.” The “it” isn’t something they’re saying. It’s something they’re hearing.
                I like hearing. I like speaking. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having an idea, but perhaps Beckett means that there is something shallow about the idea until you’re listening to more than just it. “At last I began to think, that is to say, to listen harder.” If speaking is a sketch then maybe listening is the page. If doing is a kind of dancing then maybe listening is the music.
                Just now, I don’t feel like I have very much to say. I think that’s okay. I’m telling myself,
                Listen.

“It was Friday, and I had no idea where to go with my emotions.”
                -Jennifer Hayden, Underwire

                In recent years, I’ve gotten more and more interested in short, immediate art—not quite “unedited,” but less rehearsed. That brings me into “short order poems,” which respond to a word or phrase someone gives me, and into flash fiction. It helps when I’m feeling stuck. It helps when I don’t know where to go, because I am somewhere, I’m feeling something, and when I listen that pushes toward somewhere. What happens when I’m quiet for a moment? What happens when I’m inside the confusion, or exhaustion, or excitement, or gratitude, or relief—or inside the mix I’ve found? What if you let it be weird, or sharp, or you?
                In my case, it’s often something wild. In my case, it’s sometimes something new. Once, it was something like this:

                “Sometimes”

                It undressed itself, sometimes, took off its skin, washed its muscles away in the rain, laid out its tendons on low bushes and its bones in the ground, and slipped, soaked down, slept its way into the aquifers it remembered, breathed itself out with a last sigh past old teeth to a sky—it went somewhere it didn’t know how to say and didn’t need to name, and sometimes, too, it came back, it walked up from the ground, a wisp of shape, collecting minerals, layering them, breathing earth and gathering breath and reaching out with its hands to see how it was held by hills and clouds and the tree that leaned out over the creek and the stardust that, listening, it could see.
                A he, for a moment.
                A she. 
                A they.
                A them.
                A we.
                And he, and she, and they, and them, and we, we danced a little while, and then went home, unbuttoning knuckles, unknotting skin, whispering marrow to what it’d been.