“I wish I could travel by the road that crosses baby’s mind, and out beyond all bounds;
[…] Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them…”
                -Rabindranath Tagore, “Baby’s World”

                Dr. Gordon Neufeld talks about the ‘emergent process,’ the stage of human development in which someone’s interest and intent reaches out to meet the world. It’s this process that brings a child to ‘me do it’ and an adult to ‘this matters to me.’ I’ve usually imagined it as a spring, bubbling up from somewhere inside.
                A few nights ago, my fourteen-month-old niece took me for a walk. Inside by the sliding glass door, she kept pointing out into the dark. She walks but she likes to be carried, too, and she’ll point and make sounds to show what she wants. When I put on her coat and carried her out, she wanted to go to the hottub, and stick in her feet, and splash. Then she wanted to go back toward the house. Something ran through the bushes, and she wanted to stand among the trees and listen for whatever it had been. She wanted to stick her feet into the cold water of the fountain, not splashing this time, and then go across the street to a neighbor’s holiday lights. She touched the lights, one by one, the colorful ones and the white ones, walking by herself back and forth between two bushes and a tree.
                It was wonderful, for me, to go with her and follow where she led. I wish I could travel by the road that crosses a baby’s mind. It was wonderful to see how curious she was about the world. The fountain is 49° (I checked, later), but she put her feet in three times, stopping between each to feel the water on her toes. She stopped on the sidewalk, slipping down to hands and knees to explore the stark shadow painted by a streetlamp above her. When deer ran by, she wanted to go over to them, but they were much faster than we were. I said, “Bye, deer,” and she stayed there on the street, watching where they had gone, watching me, and every now and then saying with happy, quiet certainty, 
                “Buh.”
                Bye, I think.
                I think I’d missed, until that walk, how much the emergent process is about meeting the world. It’s not just upwelling me: it’s me coming out to touch what’s there. The water, the cement, the lights.
                Where Reason makes kites of her laws and flies them. Reason and thinking through and discovering, all those are good. I would do some research to make a kite that worked, and some of the materials I needed and the laws I followed would be rigid. But they wouldn’t be the end in themselves. A kite, once its flying, lifts up from making hands to rest on the sky’s changing currents. Perhaps the laws are for lifting. Perhaps me is really me meeting.

                “The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind—whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives.”
                -Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand Faces

                I’ve loved Campbell’s image for a long time: the little, neat house of what I call my consciousness, where I putter around and work and wash the dishes, and (I imagine) the stairs that lead to a raw stone tunnel that opens to caverns and fissures and mists and dancing lights. Until more recently, I’d forgotten the next line, where Campbell says that the spirits there are those we have not integrated into our lives. So what if we did some integrating?
                When I was younger I loved swimming in the ocean, but it also scared me, sometimes. I’d seen some of those old, hokey, plastic-figure-comes-out-of-the-ocean horror movies, and sometimes when I swam I imagined tentacles unfolding toward me from the depths I couldn’t see. And I loved swimming. At midnight on New Years’ Eve, my family would sometimes go jump into the cold Northern California waves. I loved it. I came out smiling, laughing, heart racing—and it wasn’t despite what I felt of the unknown of the ocean. It was, in part, in line with it. I’d just gone down a little into the caverns. Cold water often helped me do that, when I was young: when, at 12, maybe, my family walked through several feet of snow to jump into Lake Tahoe, we weren’t jumping into it because it was comfortable. We were jumping into it for the shock and surprise, for the close touch of winter; for the mirror world, just on the other side of the dark surface, that broke apart to meet us.
                I think crying helps me do the same thing. It helps me integrate the ‘psychological power’ of a great hurt or confusion that otherwise I can’t get close to. I know howling into the night sky does, too. I should howl more. I usually think of my mind as a loose, unruly group of different speakers: this one’s hollering, “Stay in bed!” and that one would rather “Drop everything and move to somewhere else!” and of course there’s the one who’s saying, “Move,” and will say it louder—”Move, move for the sake of it, run!”—the longer I ignore him. Maybe psychological beasties who come fighting up into my meeting hall are the mes (the Grendels) who weren’t already allowed in. Maybe, if they’re brought in as members and not as invaders, they’ll eat some lentils and sit by the fire and shout their shouts, and join in all our wonderings and compromises.
                Either way, I think there’s something fun in spelunking through the caves. When I was a kid I went down into the earth with my best friend and his parents. Three quarters of the way through our forty minute tussle underground, I was belly button deep in mud (mostly, I think, because I’d gone someplace the guide told us not to; my friend and I had also swum across the underground lake, instead of waiting for the guide to show us where her company had stashed boats). I went in to feel the mud, pulling at me, and it pulled off my shoe. I lost something, of course, and after hunting around for a while, walked out with one bare foot. But the mud that pulled off my shoe was part of the ground I stood on, too.

                “…I listen to what has made it to the page. Invariably, things have arrived that I did not invite, and they are often the most interesting things in the story. By refusing to fully know the world, I hope to discover unusual formations in the landscape, and strange desires in the characters. By declining to analyze the story, I hope to keep it open to surprise. […] What I can see is always dwarfed by what I cannot know.”
                -Robert Boswell, “The Half-Known World”

                Knowing’s a bit of a fool’s game, isn’t it? It’s predicated on the predictable: that tomorrow will be like today, or that it will change according to today’s rules. Which is, largely, true: in a Philosophy class we talked about how momentous it is to realize that the same physical laws that govern our daily lives are at work in the stars. But oh, those stars. Every time I lay on my back and look at them, or at an ant, or an air conditioner, I’m faced (if I choose to be; if I let myself be) by a mystery—a half-known world, says Robert Boswell. Feynman, that great knowing unknowner, remarks somewhere that any question (why does a ball bounce?) followed carefully leads out past the edge of what anyone understands. That doesn’t mean we don’t know anything: we do, and we can use that. But knowing’s a fool’s game, definitionally incomplete. To put it differently, in a Shakespeare play it’s the Fool—the unknower—who might be able to touch the complexity of what’s going. 
                Boswell is talking specifically about how to write fiction. We should stop laundry listing characteristics, he says. Stop controlling it all, understanding it all, arranging it beforehand. “A crucial part of the writing endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark.” I’d like to teach from this, too: any time I come to a class from the perspective of my certainty, of my knowing how to see or (even worse) knowing how to “handle” the people in front of me, it all comes tumbling down. Instead I try to remember that I have things to share, and that I’m in the dark about which of those I’ll add (and how I’ll add them) to what’s discovered. 
                I’d also like to live from unknowing, I think. I knew I wouldn’t be an English major. (Cue Avenue Q: “What do you do…”). I knew I wanted to go to grad school after only a year or two of working. I knew that I wouldn’t like indoor rock climbing as much as outdoor climbing, and I knew that I only wanted to stay in Oklahoma for a year or two. Of course, none of those were true. Sometimes I know how to do everything in front of me, and then I make a hash of things, and sometimes I know I can’t do any of it, and then someone helps me get over myself, or I go to sleep; eventually, I find my way to a maybe, a mystery, a what-if or what-else or well,-there’s-this. 
                Knowing brings me back to my expectations, back to the little pile of firewood I’ve managed to gather from the forest. That firewood’s good for keeping me warm. But it’s half knowing, I think, that brings me to the woods.

                “Someone asks what time it is. I’m the first to answer. Or at the ballpark when the vendor comes. He passes the hot dog down the long row. I want my hands on it, too.”
                -Stanley Elkin, “A Poetics for Bullies”

                For the last little while my students had been talking about how hard it felt to find a way to help, given all the old, complicated hurts they saw, and then one student said: “Hang on. If I had a—a nonprofit, whatever—that helped feed people, and you knew my program was doing something, how many of you would come do some work with me?”
                There was a little pause, and then everyone held up their hand.
                I think everyone I’ve ever met has a fundamental desire to help. That might not be the only want they had: they wanted cheetos, too, maybe, and to be the best, but also to have their hands on the work of supporting someone else. Elkin’s story shows this want from its shadow side: his narrator, “Push the bully,” goes around pushing people he doesn’t know how to help. But he wants to be asked the time, and to answer. He wants to pass along a hotdog to someone hungry. 
                Maybe one of the reasons I like backpacking is that it makes this work tangible and apparent. There isn’t a place for all of us to sleep, and then someone pitches a tent. We’re thirsty, and someone pumps water from the creek. Our packs our heavy, but in them there’s food for us to eat and clothes to keep us warm. If everyone only carried their own gear, their own food, their own tent, I don’t think I’d like it half as much. 
                The trick is to take that obvious reminder and bring it back from the mountains. Sometimes that’s easier than others: at my house dishes can sit in the sink until even the ceramic starts to rust somehow, but at yours I kinda like washing the dishes. I hate keeping up with my car’s maintenance, and we should all invest in a different transportation system, but changing a tire (or even the brake pads) with you is pretty neat. I don’t quite know how, but learning feels easier as we work it through together. That’s partly because the work itself is shared and more enjoyable; all the same, if I had to figure out how to change the brake pads, alone, I’d have an easier time if it were to support you than just because I had to. That part might be me. But the larger part,  the wish to have your hands on the work of helping—that’s everyone I’ve ever met.

                “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
                “We can never go back […] But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back…”
                –Rebecca (1940)

                I had that line in my head for most of last night. My life isn’t very Hitchcockian, no murders or hidden identities—except, I suppose, those most of us have—so it isn’t that. I have been wondering about time and place, though. Last weekend I talked to friends in Oklahoma, and thought about the woods they live near, the woods I used to live near, and the way the rain filled the forest with puddles and reflections. A few days before that I heard from a friend in California, and remembered growing close as we walked along a creek; a few days before that, I talked to a friend from my time in India. I haven’t seen Rebecca since I was a kid, and when I watched it, I suppose the death and intrigue mostly missed me. But I was caught by the opening line. I felt, somehow, that sooner or later it would make sense, that there would be places I dreamt of going back to, and couldn’t go back to, and would go back to in my dreams all the same.
                There are a dozen places I’d like to live so that I could be nearer to the people I’ve grown close to. Even with moving, as so much art explores, I probably can’t go back so much as go again in a different away. All the same, when I was leaving India, and hurting at the thought of leaving the people around me, an elder told me: “You carry them all with you.” It’s a simple thought, the kind I’ve heard many times before, the kind that probably doesn’t work as clickbait. And the version of people I can carry is not the version I want, not the present companions I remember. Still, though: sometimes I feel them here. Maybe Oklahoma and California and India and Massachusetts, maybe home and valley and creek and field and hill and cave, maybe they’re all here, at least a little, at least in one way. Or maybe being here and being there and being aren’t nearly as simple, as consistent, as I so often pretend. There are so many places I’ve been that I dream of going, and can’t go to, and still, in my dreams, go back to all the same.

“i’m just going to sit here past late
the stars don’t care at what cost
you breathe while i whisper a song
‘this accident of being lost’”
                -Leanne Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost

                Lately I’ve been working at getting lost. Which is probably the problem, and shows the silliness of all my self-important determination.
                It’s not street-lost I want. I could probably do that. I could wander down some roads, have a friend drop me off somewhere, find my way back. But returning to this particular house isn’t the “coming back” I’m looking for, so that’s not the “lost” I mean. I mean—I mean lying down in a field, and not moving, because for a moment—with the swaying grass, and the beetles, and the clouds—I’ve forgotten how.
                A few weeks ago, a friend asked me to explain poetry. She studies plant physiology, and hopes to help explain to the public what climate change is doing and will do to the landscapes around us. So I told her, ‘When you’re talking to a group and they just don’t see the prairie, even though it’s right there, then maybe you could read them a poem.’ She said that made sense, but when I pushed it, when I told her a poem can help me step outside and get lost in the garden (she’s a big gardener), she said,
                “But that happens.”
                “It does?” I asked, because somehow, focused on my explanation, that surprised me.
                “Yeah,” she said. “Especially if I’m planting. Or cleaning up leaves.”
                Later, when I told her I was writing this, she laughed and asked if it would screw up my blog to admit that she’d been thinking about it, and that she “liked poetry,” she “thought it was probably a good lens to seem some specific part of all this beauty.” I told her it wouldn’t. But I’ve been thinking, too, and I’ve realized I was working at getting lost. You don’t work at the ocean holding you. You step into the ocean, and it does. I was working, trying, instead of letting myself be lost. It’s an accident, says Simpson, and in her book she also seems to say that being lost is the door we step through, or maybe, better, the ground we grow in, so that one day we might be found. It’s the place we start. As long as I’m walking the paths I know, expecting and sure of where I’m going, I won’t find my way to—what? Another? Myself? The world?
                Who knows. I’m not sure there are words for it. It’s probably more a thing of silences, like the wind across the stones or the footsteps of the rain when you look up and realize, oh, here I am. Here I am I don’t know where. Instead of trying to follow my trail or blunder off it, I’m trying to sit here, to realize that I’m already, on accident, finally, fully, lovingly l—

                “I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of having a lot of contradictory voices knocking around in my head. As a kid, I was ashamed of it. Other people seemed to feel strongly about themselves, to know exactly who they were. I was never like that.”
                -Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume”

                Lately I’ve been worried about words. All of them. These, for instance. Because look at them: it’s true that I’ve been “worried about words,” lately, but I’ve also been eating oranges. And kicking up orange leaves, and walking through snow, when it comes and lays down with everything. I’ve been sticking out my tongue to taste 11 degrees. It tastes shhhh.
                I’ve never felt like a consistent personality. There isn’t one me in me. For years I’ve felt shame around that, the shame (I think) that Zadie Smith mentions: being many and confusing and confused when I was supposed to be (I thought) one and certain. But the thing is, before that, in the gift of my early years and my early attempts at fiction or friendship making or sandcastle building, I didn’t feel ashamed at all. I felt happy. I felt playful, and serene. Irritated, and overwhelmed. I felt all kinds of things and felt like all kinds of people. I remember walking through the house making up a speech for D’Artagnan to give his friends, and then spending a little while as Frodo, looking out the window, and then going outside and narrating a conversation between characters Sibylle von Olfers gave me in The Story of the Root Children. And all of those felt me. It could be true that none of them were me, not exactly, but dancing through them made something in my heart. It made sense and meaning and joy, maybe.
                Lately I’m not so sure about words. Whenever we say something, we say this, not that. Apple doesn’t mean taste of old sunshine, and it doesn’t mean moment far away from doing, and it doesn’t mean sweet—but it did mean all those things, and more, when I ate an apple one afternoon. My attempts to stumble into the world bring me into a wondrous, confusing, ever expanding constellation of moments and maybes. To try and communicate these, to put them into words, I work to create some amount of coherence: “I ate an apple today: a taste of old sunshine: a moment far away from doing: sweet.” But that’s a list trying to conjure a loose collection. Talking is like pulling algae up from the pond (ponds are yucky, yes; they’re also full of life, and there are frogs near them, and polliwogs, and there’s light in the water if you look just right) in my mind. In the water, that algae was full and voluminous and pressed by currents. Pulled out in my hand, it’s one wet, bedraggled scrap, one pinned down thought, already drying and dying in my fingers.
                I feel the shame Zadie Smith describes. I feel it often, and a lot. But half a step away, half a turn different, there’s that pond in all its changing messy muchness. Do you feel that way, I wonder? Do you spend time there? Do you tell yourself you shouldn’t? If you stopped pulling yourself toward coherence, toward consistency, if you sat down and splashed in the green water and felt so many things, do you think you might—well, might something with sand castles, which are the beach and the shape you’ve made and the promise of washing to something else, and more, and are all those things, together, and all at once?

“The Child on the Shore”
Ursula Le Guin

Wind, wind, give me back my feather
Sea, sea, give me back my ring
Death, death, give me back my mother
      So that she can hear me sing.

Song, song, go and tell my daughter
Tell her that I wear the ring
Say I fly upon the feather
      Fallen from the falcon’s wing

                I try to keep things. And of course, sometimes, instead, I should try to let them go.
                Lately I’ve been holding on and holding on and holding on to my novel. Playing with the story can be a lot of fun: I like the people in this world I’ve found, I like what they do, what they mean to each other. But as I go through the chapters, revising them, I sometimes get my hands all bunched up. This way, I pull at things: be this way. And then, to whatever degree the world in my novel’s becoming real, it won’t just move to my yanking. I’m pulling at ideas I planted five years ago, and some of them have grown.
                My friend recently told me that all stories are necessarily digressive: there’s this, and this, and this, and no piece is just itself, and we’ve never started where everything really starts. Which is to say, I might really be talking about my friend Trystan, who died when we’d both just started our twenties. And that, of course, has its sadness — aching sadness, like the child’s aching song in the first stanza of Le Guin’s poem. But the second stanza is the mother, singing back: what the child’s lost the child has really given, and the mother reaches back across the bridge the child hoped to find—across song—to say, ‘I’m flying with what you gave me.’ I miss my friend. I’m still learning to sing how I miss him. And I’m still learning to hear his song, in memories, in the lives he touched, in all of us who still live with him.
                I’m trying to pull at my novel a little less. I’m trying to pull at everything a little less. I think back to other friends who are still alive, but who have moved far away from me. I want to call out, “come back.” But they went where they are because it was part of their growing. They’re living in that other place. Le Guin says walk on the shore, sing the sadness, but listen for the songs that come back. The ones you weren’t expecting. Watch for where what you thought you lost has become a feather for another’s wing. We all call out, sending ourselves into the world: listen, says Le Guin, for everyone calling back.

“Poets aren’t very useful.
Because they’re aren’t consumeful or very produceful.”
                -Ogden Nash

”To have a friend, be a friend.”
                -What My Mom Used To Say (And Sometimes Still Says)

                It seems about time, after two-hundred and twenty-two weeks of wandering around with all these words — mucking about in the mud, watching tadpoles, feeling storms — to stop, and sit, and yawn, and scratch my nose, and read some Nash, and remember that I don’t want — oh, please, no — to get produceful. 
                I think an emphasis on useful can push us towards using. It can show us a world of pulleys and levers, where I wonder what friends to make so I end up with friends in high places, what words to say so people like me, what trampolines to find so I’m launched up by springs others made to land high on ‘success.’ (I imagine it as the cement statue of a fat elephant, or maybe a heffalump, actually, decorated with plastic bits and mirrors). When I teach to be useful, I’m thinking about where to get my students to sit, what to lead them into doing, what habits to imprint on them, so they can make people like them and bounce on trampolines, too. And I don’t want that world. I get pulled there, I trick myself to going there, I get convinced it’s the only “here,” but it’s not, and I don’t want it.
                Nash doesn’t say that poets don’t do those things: they aren’t those things. Their world is a place of being and becoming. Be friends. Be kind. Be an actual elephant, peanut eating, water spouting, or a someone, evening yawning, nose scratching, water watching, or an uncle, baby holding, spit-up cleaning, feet planting so you can be the jungle gym on which your niece is climbing swinging. There is so much more to all of this than levers and pulleys. I don’t want to push and pull and calculate until my life falls out, fully wrapped, from the factory I’ve imagined. I don’t want to keep asking if I’m productive. Poets aren’t very useful. They make friends to be friends. If a teacher is a teacher like a poet is a poet, it’s something they are: supportive, open-minded, encouraging, attentive, silly, respectful, excited to see and ready to share. Poets are sayers of funny things. They’re listeners. They’re makers. They’re sharers. They are. And if teaching poetry taught me anything, it’s that everyone — everyone, everyone — can write a poem.

                “Gregor lost his boot in a mudhole, but I don’t think he ever got justice. Books can be nicer than life sometimes.” -Vera Brosgol, in her author’s note for Be Prepared, the mostly-true story of a nine year old’s summer camp
                “What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. […] If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

                When my little brother was younger I told him stories about fairies. We’d lie down and explore how different groups — the fairies who lived in forests, or mountains, or beaches — wove themselves into the world. What did they do when it rained? What were their clothes made from? How did they interact with seagulls and bats, swallows and squirrels and beetles? When he got older, when he asked, “Do you really believe in fairies,” I didn’t know what to say. Because the answer was, I suppose, and sadly, “No.” I don’t believe that there are little creatures with two legs and caretakers’ hands who walk beneath the leaves. I didn’t want to get him teased by his friends. But the answer’s also, “Yes:” I think there are caretakers. I think there’s magic, a world brimming with it, and it’s all the more wondrous for moving through light waves and roots and nitrogen. And there are so many little creatures, two-legged and otherwise, who wander through a world larger than they know.
                In writing this, I’m smiling, because I’m remembering sitting outside with my little brother. I’m remembering how he looked while he listened. I’m a child myself, going out to see how the bucket of rainwater has a face of ice in the morning. Last week, in a PhD physics lab at the University of Illinois, I listened to a friend explain equipment that she uses to grow crystals a few atomic layers thick. Listening to her I felt that same wonder. For me, I think, that wonder washes in on waves of fairy stories and scientific curiosity. 
                In Be Prepared, Gregor is the camp nerd, and Alexei is the mean, handsome boy who leads others in laughing at him. Brosgol gives Gregor and Alexei their “just desserts:” Gregor gets a moment of kindness and connection; Alexei finds a sketch of himself crumpled up and thrown into the latrine. He gets to see how some people view his meanness.
                “Books can be nicer than life sometimes.”
                Books can let us draw the resolutions we have in our heads, the movements we imagine, and where those movements end. I think sketching those arcs, as we grow and choose who to be, is incredibly powerful.At the same time, Emerson says compensation isn’t the heaven or hell we get for what we’ve done. Compensation doesn’t come later and somewhere else: it’s woven in here and now. I still believe in fairies, and when I move into that, the compensation is how I look at growing things and the equipment in the lab. I’m also mean, sometimes: I remember being thirteen and saying something I knew would hurt, because it would hurt. My “just desserts” weren’t only the feeling I had in that moment, but also the place I moved into by doing that: I’d treated a person as not a person, and to that extent, I’d moved away from the connection I really wanted.
                The back of Brosgol’s book shows a girl running through the woods with a flashlight. A story, sometimes, is the flashlight we shine to pick out details of what happened and how it changed us. Maybe that’s why books are “nicer:” they let us see the changings in our hearts that might, otherwise, go unseen (but still felt) in the dark.