Learning to Swim

I wrote this a while back during my master's thesis studies & have been slowly revising it ever since. It's the holidays, which by nature engender a compulsion in me to reflect on faith, my family, and blessing. This essay is just such a reflection. Note: My family's names have been changed, since I'm still too much a chickenshit to use their real ones...

Learning to Swim

“Love is not a victory march/It’s a cold and it’s a broken/Hallelujah”

– Rufus Wainwright

Somewhere, buried in an old photo album, is a photograph my father likes to bring up in family conversations. Apparently it was all the rage in 1983 to bring your infant to the local pool and, quite simply, fling them in. My father says it was a program called Aquababies, designed to familiarize children with water before they were old enough to fear it. In the photo, I’m dog paddling just below the surface of the unnaturally blue water, clad in a frilly navy kiddy suit. As was a strange habit that has lasted into my twenties, my eyes are wide open regardless of the chlorine stinging them. I like to see where I’m going. I imagine my mother taking the photo while standing off to the side, camera trained on me, bubbles streaming from my nose as I paddle toward the arms and hands stretching over from the far right side of the frame—my father’s arms. My father compares this photo to one he’s taken of me in full scuba gear, eyes wide open under the goggles. He says I’ve always sort of looked like a bug, under water. I don’t remember Aquababies at all. I do know that I swim quite well.

In recalling old photographs and bringing them up, at dinner, family barbeques or when a relative comes to visit, my father reminds me that, no matter what, I am still his little girl. He doesn’t say it outright; he’s a quiet man, one who is awkward (although not visibly) around crying women—my mother, for example. When we talk on the phone now, although I am an adult of twenty-five and can talk about ‘adult things’, he would rather discuss the state of the laptop he bought me for graduating with my BA. It is not that he doesn’t converse; he does, but he sometimes ends up sounding like an instructional video for bow hunting or Macintosh computers or Republican politics. (These, of course, are three things close to his heart.) We yell at each other from time to time, over who’s right about inconsequential things: how long it really takes to grill a salmon fillet, which happened first in a series of events, what to listen to on the radio in the car (my pick: music; his: Michael Savage on talk radio). Yet my father’s smile widens in his handsome face when he talks about those old photographs, and underneath what could be inconsequential words is that unspoken message: You are my child and I love you. This is what I hear when I hear my father, telling my aunt about the swimming pool picture, “She still looks like that sometimes.”

*

I cannot tell you what I don’t remember, and so I cannot tell you what it feels like to fly, to exist as nothing but a dark object in motion against a black sky. I cannot tell you the color of the truck that slammed into the Ford Bronco I was riding in, and I cannot tell you how long it was before I regained consciousness. What I can tell you is this: it was cold. When the paramedics arrived, they cut off my new sweatshirt, a fifty-dollar waterproof one; my mother had purchased it for me earlier that day. I touched the chilled and dripping gash in my forehead; it felt like a half-frozen steak. What I looked like immediately following that terrible car accident is not something I can tell you either; I had no mirror. Until the ambulance arrived, I lay sprawled on the side of the road, covered in someone’s jacket. The two friends I’d been in the Bronco with appeared overhead, their faces pushed in around me. If I looked like a bug at all, it was of the variety you might find mashed on your windshield. Apart from my two friends, Tim and Sarah, who’d wanted to go bowling that night despite the icy roads, I didn’t know anyone else who was present. I can tell you that my right arm felt detached from my body, and that after reaching up to touch the bloody left side of my face, I didn’t have enough energy to move again. I briefly saw the face of the kid who had t-boned us hovering above me; inexplicably, I seem to recall noting that he was good-looking. For the duration of the ride to the ER, the tight, restrictive C-collar around my neck had me in a state of panic. I worried little about who was going to break the news to my parents. Everyone had cell phones, I figured. I wouldn’t be lost in the ER, on a gurney somewhere all by myself. Someone would come for me.

*

I believe it must be a supreme act of faith—in what, I’m not quite certain—to do what my parents did at the swimming pool. To pick your child up, to bless them or pray over them or think nothing at all, and then to fling them forth into what might harm. Some people might call it the ultimate aberrant act—chucking your baby into a swimming pool on purpose. It is one thing, I think, to let go of your child, to offer him over to an unknown deliberately, all the while standing by, controlling the variable that is yourself—your fear, your parental instinct, the impulse to dive in after. It is one thing to willingly fling your child into the water. It is another when the world does it for you. No one but she herself will ever know what it is my mother was thinking when she received the phone call telling her that very thing: that one of her children had been flung headlong into the water without her consent, without arms outstretched to catch her.

For a woman who chose to marry an avid hunter and fisherman, who has spent much of that married life cleaning, gutting, quartering and grinding moose, or scaling and beheading dozens of fish at a time, my mother occasionally displays a desperate panic when faced with blood. I suppose, given that this is when one of the six of us injures ourselves, her fear of blood is not of the blood itself, but of what’s happened to the bleeder. She has dealt admirably with split lips and eyebrows, with one brother’s chin gashed all the way across (Gabe tripped and fell on the metal lip of the shower; we got at least a few lollipops each out of that one), with the screwdriver lodged in another brother’s palm (Levi claims he was fixing the trucks on his skateboard; none of the rest of us even knew what a skateboard truck was.) She, fairly calmly, has even handled my little sister belting Gabe in the face with a rock. I suppose the deciding factor in her level of calm the night of the accident was what she later told me the doctor had said:

If she had been in any worse shape, or if she’d been any older, she would have been dead.

The only thing I remember hearing the doctor say was that it would be no problem to stitch up my eyebrow, right there in the ER. All he needed, he averred, was some local anaesthetic and a suture kit. He did just what he’d said, my mother standing somewhere else, refusing to watch as the needle slid in and out of my skin. My mother remembers but that single statement, the one that brought that latent motherly terror to life. She masked her fear from her children, usually, accustomed to running through her ‘crying child’ checklist before pulling out the first aid kit or calling my father to come take a look:

Are you bleeding?

Is anything broken?

Are you dying?

Is anything on fire?

Then you’re fine.

I was not fine. And so my mother was not fine, every maternal fear there is solidified into one. Although I was well aware that she disliked the sight of blood, and especially of her children bleeding, her reaction surprised me. Sometimes the strangest reactions are those of the person who hasn’t been hurt, who’s visiting you in the hospital, just someone bringing flowers or a paperback novel. I had assumed my mother, being my mother, would do something, well…motherly. Touch my hand, perhaps, or stroke back my hair. Instead, and this I saw from the usual hospital-bed angle, which is to say hovering over my face slightly to the left; she leaned down a little, frowned hugely at my newly-stitched forehead, and said, I’m going to go call your father.

*

I do remember a ragged series of vignettes that is most of my family arriving in the ER. First, my sister. She wouldn’t come near me. I was not given the opportunity to see her face hovering above mine as I had my mother’s, but, in a disorienting fashion, I could hear her. I guessed she was standing at the foot of the gurney, but I couldn’t tell. Since they hadn’t cleaned the blood from the left side of my face, I was afforded vision only from my right eye, and only straight up above me. My ears, however, were perfectly fine, and they told me my sister’s reaction quite clearly. She was sobbing over there somewhere: Oh my god. She’s all broken…

A number of minutes later, Gabe, the eldest of my younger brothers (there are four). In his usual manner, he stuffed his hands in his pockets (I heard him do this, as he stood close to my head) and nodded down at me. His slightly gruff and awkward manner reminds me very much of my father; neither of them is good at talking about ‘feelings’; when Gabe and I see each other off at the airport after a visit, it’s a quick one-armed hug, a pat on the back. We don’t really say ‘I love you’. Gabe’s reaction didn’t surprise me when at last he said something: Huh. You look like shit.

Too young to drive themselves over, and exactly young enough to potentially get in the way, the youngest three brothers—Steven, Levi, and David—were still at home. It was just as well, I suppose, since after Gabe arrived, I was moved around, wheeled off down a hallway for x-rays and MRIs, the buzzy-bright hospital lighting hurting my eyes. The x-ray room is the last thing I remember; I must have fallen asleep for the first time shortly thereafter, and would spend most of my six-day hospital stay doing nothing but sleeping. Here is something I do not remember: my father’s arrival to the ER.

*

On one of those six days, having woken up for a little while, like a free diver simply coming back up for air before heading back underwater, I was greeted by all three of my youngest brothers and one of my cousins. Grandma Ann—my father’s mother—was up in Alaska visiting, and she accompanied them. My three youngest brothers—Steven, Levi and David—and cousin Alison had pooled their money to buy me a gift: a new sweatshirt to replace the one cut from my body. Grandma Ann had brought one too, later, Gabe brought me a present of his own; yet another hooded sweatshirt, this one black with red lettering. When something is lost, my family is the kind who replaces it: stuffed toys, shirts or hats that remind us of favorites stained or shredded, especially if one of us has been sick, when we’ve been afraid for one another. Once, when I was a toddler, having my fingers pricked for blood tests, Gabe appeared at the doctor’s office with a stuffed Rainbow Brite dog—this is one of my first memories, in fact. But for our ability to give gifts to one another, we are unable to express what we really mean: that we have been sleepless, worried, and in despair; that when someone we care for may be taken from us, or is hurt, we fill the spaces made by our fear with things—my mother bakes bread or cookies for sick neighbors; we buy novels and books of crosswords when someone is in the hospital; my aunts proffer bottles of wine and movies for a break-up. The fears of my brothers, my cousin, my sister, my grandmother—these are spaces filled with fleece and pull-strings, with the sweatshirts they brought me because they feared that I would be lost.

My father was there from time to time, I’m sure. I heard his voice as I came out of long naps several times, radiating out from his position at the foot or by the side of my bed. The quietude, the air of organization and knowledge that have comforted me always, were there without question. While I can’t recall him ever touching me, or adjusting my pillow, or bringing me drinks of water, I liken the atmosphere created by his presence to a specific memory from childhood. I was probably seven, maybe eight years old, very sick with a fever that caused me to have bizarre nightmares. In these nightmares, I was surrounded by nothing but undulating, pulsing black and white shapes, and a high-pitched continuous whine rang in my ears. For whatever reason, these nightmares forced me into a state of panic on that particular night. I was exactly lucid enough to remember where my parents’ room was: out my bedroom door, take a right, take another right before the kids’ bathroom door, down the hall, through the living room, into what we called the ‘new addition’. My parents slept on a bed that folded down from the wall, big and comfortably. My father had built it himself. Even in my terribly ill state, the one thing I can recall is this: I knew my father would be in that room sleeping. I needed to get to my father. As soon as I crawled into the big, foldout bed with my father, I fell asleep. I know this because I remember my mother—who had been out at my aunt and uncles’, I believe—coming home, which woke me up; she asked my father why I was there. He replied with something, picked me up, and carried me back to my own bed. This did not frighten me over again. I knew my father was there. This was not true of the ER. I fill my father in: present, as he is in the pictures from the swimming pool, yet periphery, there because he must have been, because otherwise, whose arms were those, stretching out toward me?

*

My mother is the one who nurses us when we are sick. She is the one who, faced with a child so sick they refused to eat, would park one of us at the dining room counter and ask if we wanted some ice cream for breakfast. She once camped out on our living room floor with a stomach-achey, crying me and called it ‘our picnic’; never mind that the picnic consisted solely of flat 7-Up. My father is the man who taught us to shoot bows and arrows in the backyard, who once forced a trout hook back out of my chin after I’d been hooked by Gabe’s botched casting. As I spent the few weeks following my discharge from the hospital back on the couch in my parents’ house, my parents, together—Mom with her offerings of cold juice, Dad rising early in the morning to check on me—pervaded my senses, dulled as they were by too much sleep and pain medication. More healing than the medication and the bandages, this sense of being back at home, surrounded by my mother—care and concern, ice cream for my sickness—and my father—the arms outstretched from the corner of the photograph. Once again I was learning to swim. I couldn’t bathe myself without someone helping me drag my useless right arm out of its shirtsleeve. Everything I did, I did left-handed, shuffling around the house in a pair of my father’s old sweatpants and one of my new sweatshirts Once, at dinner a few days after being discharged, I was praised for slowly eating almost all of a baked potato. My parents were a team through all of this, doling out pills, giving pillows, checking back with the hospital about bills and aftercare and checkups. Another way to fill the space: You are living. We will put your life back in order. Gradually things returned to their normal movement. Although I can’t remember doing much but sleeping and watching TV for some weeks, these boring sequences—sleep, bathe clumsily, eat, take pills, watch T.V.—are nevertheless memories. It wasn’t until over a month afterwards that I would learn how my father’s memory of the accident, layered over the accident itself, consisted of what sounded at first like nothing but a song.

I was sitting at the kitchen table one evening listening to music. My father was nearby—perhaps making dinner or doing the dishes. My mother was in their bedroom, probably sitting on the fold-down bed, doodling plans for a new dream house or taking a nap. My brothers and sister were all off on their own, watching TV or at friends’ houses, or outside playing basketball in the driveway. The ways in which we’d lived with each other, eaten, played, slept—all these small routines filled the house with the white noise of family, a white noise that I was drawn out of by the melody of a Rufus Wainwright song:

I heard there was a secret chord

that David played and it pleased the Lord.

But you don’t really care for music, do you?

It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth.

The minor fall, the major lift,

the baffled king composing

Hallelujah.

Hallelujah.

It’s a beautiful song, touching in its simplicity, just a guy and his piano and a simple chord progression. It was on a movie once, “Shrek” I think it was. My father, who will only listen to songs like this—just guys and their guitars or pianos, simple, like those he remembers from his own childhood—looked up from his cooking or dishes, and paused for a second. He leaned out of the kitchen and said,

“You know, when you were having your car accident, I was listening to this song.”

It was said in his regular, matter-of-fact voice, and yet what it meant caused a wave to wash over my core. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around what it meant, even though simply hearing the words had such an effect. For a long time I attempted, using the exaggerated tries at reason that occur when I am faced with moments like these, moments I ought, I suppose, to simply let be in their import, the way they change what I remember and what I think about what I cannot recall. I tried to logically piece together the timeline. When did the song begin? Was it playing before or after my mother made the call from the hospital? How could my father possibly have known that the two things occurred at the same exact time? Finally I realized that none of that mattered. Finally the revelation of what this memory meant to my father, and therefore to me, came about. What it meant was this:

Because, at the time of the accident—the time of car hitting car, of bitter Alaskan winter night’s cold, of my body hurled into darkness—the word ‘Hallelujah’ was pronounced in a song, my father had never doubted that I would live. Some might call it out of place: ‘hallelujah’ is a word of rejoicing, what some call the highest word. How could it be joyful, against that scene in the darkness, that scene that might have resulted in my death? But because my father is faithful, and because he remembers what I do not, I believe that the song was a comfort to him, that it was joyful because of what he knew then. I believe that the simple chorus replaces my own lost memories, gives me over to my father’s knowledge that I remained among the living, although I myself was unconscious. I am grateful for having survived, yes, although to what or whom precisely I don’t quite know. I am grateful to others’ memories for filling in my spotty one—my father’s, my mother’s, those memories running in tandem while mine could not.

If the accident were a movie, its soundtrack would be Rufus Wainwright, singing his hallelujahs over the ringing of the telephone. Its visual sequences would play out simultaneously: my father at the computer, turning up the song; my body flung through the cold, clear sky, or strapped to a gurney, speeding to the hospital; my mother picking the phone from its cradle, unsuspecting. What my father remembers: that a single, bright word struck him—‘hallelujah’ from computer speakers. What my mother remembers: mostly that she was terrified, that she went to the hospital alone. That her checklist of fears was real. What I remember: only waking up.

*

The accident was, of course, many years ago, and the injuries have all healed. There remains a scar through my left eyebrow, one that surprises people—most only notice it in the right lighting, or when I’m not wearing make up, and immediately they ask me to recount what happened. I’m getting pretty efficient at detailing everything, but only up to the moment of impact. After that, I rely on what I’ve been told: bits and pieces from Tim and Sarah, some from the doctor who stitched me up, some from my mother. The ordering of events doesn’t always sound the same. I don’t always include the same details or names or descriptions of vehicles; the announcement of it all seems superfluous, the scar itself enough a memory. I cannot describe to anyone that the most vibrant recollection is not a true memory, not that sequence of images dredged up by sight or smell or sound.

I remember the accident most vividly when that Rufus Wainwright song comes on. Sometimes, in need of reassurance or a reminder that I’ve lived, I play it repeatedly, turning the volume up. In place of that hour of unconsciousness, my memory fills up with a vision of my father, sitting as he must have been that night—in front of his computer, reading the daily news online, some awareness woken by the first moments of the song. These are his memories, not mine, and yet I can feel them, the immersive realizations he came to covering up the fear he must have felt. There’s a montage running through my head at moments like these, much like the motion picture I imagine my body’s flight to be, a series of half-lit images that in fact I never saw. I play the song so that I don’t forget what never, in so many respects, actually happened to me, and the blank space in my memory fills up like an empty vessel with something strange and overwhelming. I’m recovering once again, having almost drowned each time in renewed astonishment that I’ve survived. These things I don’t remember play over in my thoughts as the song does through its fuzzy speakers, a voice under water telling me what I’ve come to know—faith, my father, ‘hallelujah’.

Why, yes, I am kind of a socialist hippie.

I wrote this eons ago for possibly one of the best classes I've ever taken-with one of the best professors, who shall remain nameless. But, I've been thinking a lot about work, what it really means, and why it's valuable to me to consistently 'work', rather than taking on the attitude that if I didn't have to, I wouldn't...

Throughout Karl Marx’ major works, there is a tone of derisiveness; Marx’ venom is directed towards that class of people which represents capitalism. His sympathies are reserved mainly for the lower—class, and in particular for the working class. Conception of the state of the working class as unacceptable, as objectified, is extremely important to the understanding of Marx and his ideas. To work, as it stands today, has become a detached, even degrading process, by which men are removed from the very natures and desires that inspired them to labor, to create products to begin with.

In order to better understand how it is that men can be completely segregated from his occupation and the fruits of it, we must first understand Marx’ ideas about alienation; how does it come about, and through what avenues might it be avoided? Here, we see that there exists a relationship between workers, and the products that they create and export to the outside world. What makes a relationship such as this possible, when ‘products’, as most would see them, are inanimate, expendable objects? Marx seems to believe that a product is imbued with the essence of its creator; when someone labors to create something, it becomes a part of them. For example, a woodworker who carves a great statue has spent his energies upon it, such that the statue is now dear to his heart; in a way, it now holds a personal attachment for him. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that the very essence of human-ness is removed from us when we begin simply working; labor becomes not a reason to exist, but a means by which we simply survive. Marx is also wholly opposed to the processes by which men become removed from what he calls “the sensuous external world”, meaning that world around us which is completely natural, is nature itself. Another issue of great concern to Marx is that of the appropriation of this external world; he maintains that, when made to labor extensively, we become detached from the true purpose of it. It becomes less an appreciated “means of existence” and more an indirect means of survival. We are no longer connected to that which has sustained our means of work.

What is most repellent to Marx is not this idea of alienation itself, but the final outcome of being thus removed from our once inherent rapport with the world around us. Marx states:

“ In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a slave of the object….”

This is illustrated as a rather monotonous cycle, throughout which man receives work itself (a job) and then produces something by which he is able to subsist. Without work itself, and without the product to sell, or to get paid to make, he cannot exist. Marx offers several juxtapositions that illustrate the eventual result of this cycle, which, he says, rotates in accordance with the laws of political economy. The relationship of worker to product/production is presented as a nearly-parasitic coexistence: for example, the more the laborer expends, the less he receives; the more value he creates (the more product), the less valuable he himself becomes. As alienation of worker from product is discussed, so is the alienation of the worker from the means of production; after all, if one becomes removed from an object, it stands to reason that one would also become rather indifferent to the fabrication of that object in the process.

During this sense of what Marx calls “alienation of labor”, the work begins to externalize itself from the laborer. It is no longer in his nature to do the work he is now required to carry out. (Perhaps this can be likened to a desk clerk continuing, day after day, to file papers, all the while knowing that she was born to be on Broadway.) Unable to fulfill any personal hopes or dreams while laboring, the worker must therefore turn to leisure for a feeling of well-being. In some respects this is a valid argument, since most of us can relate to the fervent daydream that five o’clock might roll around sooner, allowing us to adjourn our workplaces and go fishing.

Throughout his discussion of alienation of labor, and of the process of laboring, Marx emphasizes that the products being created are always expended, never taken in; the energy and effort of working are always for the benefit of others, not for the worker himself. Here we discover the true reason for his dislike of alienation in its various forms. Since the products themselves have become alien, and the activity of fabricating them is not only alien, but also forced upon us, it cannot belong to us. If the worker himself is not the recipient of any such benefits, then some other human being must be. Thus, using the comparisons given earlier, such as that of the worker becoming less valuable while his work is more so, the labor/product that has caused so much degradation to the laborer must be doing the opposite for someone else.

Marx uses this demonstration of opposites to illustrate the point that there are two factions of society being created by alienated labor: that of the worker, the oppressed, and that of the man who does not work; he also suggests that there is a relationship between the capitalist, and work. Recall that one of Marx’s greatest nemeses is the concept of capitalism, and there lies the basis for much of his opposition to alienation, which he sees as supporting the capitalist agenda. A large portion of his ire is also reserved for the fact that, using the theories already discussed, the inevitable result of alienation is the emergence of private property. To Marx, whose Communist Manifesto is a treatise of one purpose only, that being the abolition of such private property, this is utterly repugnant. Therefore, in order to further his theories about Communism, Marx must have had to attack that which undermined such ideas, namely the concept of alienated labor.

Post-First-Snow/Variety Show

Music.

It's there, although it seems it isn't. The un-sound of the world around me in a snowstorm is unmistakable; as has been posited many a time, it's not a muffling, nor an absence of sound, but rather a constriction of wavelengths, the shortening & refining of the frequencies of certain elements: feet on snow, breath, the snow itself falling.

On a blizzard-y day, you can hear forever.

Roadtripping from island to island on the way to Bellingham last weekend, I stumbled on the track 'The Gloaming" by Radiohead. God, it's bass-heavy. I wanted to throw myself up against a speaker bank & let go; while I don't miss the scene at all, nor a lot of the people in it-at least the ones I knew when still going to house parties & raves & CD release parties, their glazed-over demeanors too much finally-there's something about bass-heavy music that's so primal I can't stay away from it. Ecstatic stasis: the rhythm & frequency of something matching a heartbeat, a breathing pattern, a circadian emotional rhythm equal to your own, whether you recognize it or not.

Some band who'd clearly idolized Everclear a little much in their adolescence played in Bellingham last weeked. They tried to cover Mumford & Sons' "Little Lion Man" 2 octaves too high, in a major key, with no banjo. Something in my inner ear shattered. Then we left the bar.

What frequency, what tonal compunction was it, I wonder, that brought me to you? That held me in place, head flung back, waiting? No matter. It's winter again. Everything is tuned down a half-step, its key shifted from minor to major, sleep & snow & flat light slowing everything to a pace we all match-here on the edge of this piece of land, ocean on three sides, parallel highways on the other.

There's a specific pitch to tires rotating over asphalt. A different one to your forehead on mine. Yet another to our voices-whether I should put them together, or split them into clefs, I'm not sure.

The wind is throwing snow from the cedars into the windows, across the roof: cymbal rush. I've settled into a beat here that I think I can sustain. I write letters. Poems. Sometimes I sing. These words are so far-flung, and so close to one another, like a chorus singing rounds: make new friends, but keep the old. One is...

One is ever a currency; a ha'penny for a tune, minstrel, bard.

All of a sudden?

Sometimes I wonder if, because I'm short of stature, my growth occurs in heart and mind, since it cannot in body; sometimes, it feels as if I'm catching up to myself, doing so in leaps and bounds, growth spurts of the spirit that I can't keep up with, and it lays me out, and builds me up.

This last weekend is an example of such growth, that, like the Grinch, my heart has swelled up to 20x its size. After a long and raucous 'family' dinner (for we've cobbled together a family here, of friends & fellow volunteers), and a decent night's sleep, nine of us trooped out to Tarboo Bay for some conservation work, consisting of pulling invasive English ivy from a location around the beach from the bay. The water was low when we arrived, and we picked our way through piles of driftwood stacked feet high, into our site.

The weather was clear but brisk, and the bay itself a wide, glittering stretch of water. Few houses lined it. Old pilings dotted the way out to sea. It smelled of mud and beach grass and pine. We worked. And while we worked we shouted. We hollered and cussed and hacked things with tools, pulling mats of ivy up by hand & stuffing them into burlap sacks. We talked nonsense: meatloaf pizza, the movie 'Deliverance', Bill Clinton, a record number of 'your mom' jokes, and 'that's what she said' one-liners. The wind blew in. Someone hacked up a stump. The stream bank was slick with mud. Someone else tried to run up it and failed. And we laughed. Oh, how we laughed.

Gut-constricting, leg-crossing, contorting laughter. At everything. At the names of plants, invasive or not. The girls at the boys' manly posturing with pruning shears & hoes. The boys at the girls' occasional shrieks of disgust. At the wind, the bay's nearby waves against the shore; at the gulls. At life.

It was backbreaking work, but. After only 2 hours, we all felt exhausted. The clouds had rolled in a bit & the wind was now whipping through the trees. Yet we detoured several times on the way home, tarrying in old-growth apple orchards, long abandoned, to shake down & pick up as many as we could. More laughter. Someone stepped in bear scat, prompting a lengthy discussion of shitting in the woods in its varying forms. Bags & bags & bags of apples. Blackberry brambles. Exhaustion.

I called it being "blissed out on life"-this curious & overwhelming feeling of satisfaction with the day, with the people around me, with the world. I feel smug, & sated, & overdone with the joy of all of this: apples & headwaters & laughing, with the revelation of being both small in a huge world, and big enough to take it all in.

I learn. Every day. My heart is expanding with thankfulness for what I'm taught. Today I learned to be forthright, firm & fair all at once. To wrangle back neediness in favor of love; the fallibility of what we become when we're shrewish & tired & want only to be comforted, when what we ought to do is give comfort instead. To accept my own distances-from myself as well as from others, the perspective gained by maintaining proximity: human beings can orbit each other, too, when they need to, & sometimes they must.

I'm taught that I'm capable of this-that I can take responsibility for what I'm good at, or bad at, or must be cognizant of. That this should not mean an argument, or hurt feelings, or a slight. That it simply means that I'm here, and present, and must therefore be willing to be fallible.

To be humbled.

I am. Because, as easy as it generally is to say the opposite, to dwell on a sliver in the skin, the chill instead of the warmth that comes after, it humbles me to give pause and then say that, irrefutably, my life is amazing. And more than that, that I am surrounded by stunning people who teach me something new every day-about them, about myself. About what it means to give, to teach & be taught. About laughing.

At everything. Every single day.

Poetry break!

This was inspired by an absolutely incredible day of, first, conservation work, and then, a little apple picking expedition with friends.

Apple-picking in Late Afternoon

And, when we’d come back—across cloud-gray piles

of driftwood, beach grass

laid flat by the tide, jeweled with tiny mussels—there

were apples

shook down from trees into hands

puckering mouths

unable to contain the shouting laughter

that had rung out all day

stringing together—the baritone and alto and high

we strange

seabirds, we gulls

and now, we grazers, joy-slaked

juvenile deer, rubber boots stamping out

our stakes: this patch of nettles, this old-growth

orchard—hills swept with wind

and with light—this

red-leafed spreading tree,

to which we can do little

but gasp, and paw, and exclaim—

look at it will you

just look

just look

"And that was no small thing, the pain you felt..."

This poem has been coming back to me time and time again all week long; or, rather, the final two lines of a poem-what I believe might be the most poignant sonnet I've ever read, written by a dear friend of mine.

We all agreed, on one day or the other this week, that it had been the hardest to date. I can't say for certain, beyond work woes, or being short on gas money, or just flat out being overwhelmed, why anyone else had such a rough time, but in a nutshell (a large one), here's mine:

As aforementioned by J-Sqwalles, one of our team members, I found a dog in Port Angeles. He was skinny, dirty, scared, hungry, and alone, and a golden retriever to boot. Who's NOT a huge sucker for golden retrievers? Seriously. After much coaxing and several pilfered chicken breasts, myself and my friends Marie, Elizabeth, Paige managed to get him into Elizabeth's car, and drive him to the Humane Society.

It was a bit of an ordeal, but after a quick exam and a scan, it was determined that he was not tagged nor microchipped, and as the HS was closing for the weekend, they advised that one of us take him home and care for him. We left Marie's phone number.

I christened him Persy, and after a bath, being made much of, and several metric tons of treats, he was doing much better. We played fetch. He came home to Port Townsend with me and slept on the bed. His tail filled out with brushing, and he came when I called him, even by this new name. I have had golden retrievers all my life-as my father's field dogs, who swam and hid and fetched dummies and ducks, as puppies from litters we donated to the Guide Dog organizations to train. My own last, most loved pet was a golden named Winston. Persy was no exception. I loved him immediately.

A week or so later, it came to rise that Persy DOES have an owner, a very nice lady named Lorraine who entrusted the care of her beloved dog to the wrong person, a person who tied him up outside alone and left him, and didn't bother to go looking for him when he got lost. Lorraine wanted to come pick Persy up immediately. It was Monday.

It was also on Monday that I walked into my 4th grade classroom, where I work with several very troubled and problem children. They are my 'boys'-a freckled, tousled, motley little crew who, no matter how many pencils they sharpen during class, or bathroom breaks they take, or loud noises they make, are still doing their best. They're doing the best they can. I was told that B., one of the students I'd been working with, was unexpectedly pulled out of school, and moved. His parents were perpetually late, or not in attendance at his conferences and plays and presentations. They were on welfare. B. has been sleeping on relatives' couches and floors for weeks. And now he was gone. All that progress was gone.

Lorraine called again. Her aunt and uncle would be in Port Townsend that evening to pick Persy up. Persy, my now-beloved dog, who I hadn't slept without since I found him. B. was gone. Just a couple of days ago, we sat in my classroom eating Dum-Dums mystery flavored suckers and doing fractions. He was learning. He WANTED to learn.

My friends were stressed out, too. I'd been getting texts and calls all weekend. My best friend, my rock, is on the verge of a divorce. I had $20 to my name until payday.

Lorraine called again. She really is very sweet. She praised my care of Persy.

"I want to send you some money," she said, "for the vet bills and other things. And a reward, I'm just so grateful you found him!"

But I don't WANT a reward, lady! I want the dog! Can't you see how badly I want the dog?

"Ok, well, my aunt and uncle will be there to pick him up soon, I'll have them call you."

I had to leave the classroom. I went outside in the chilled sunshine, and sat on the back steps, and cried. Yes, I cried. What else was I supposed to do?

Lorraine's aunt and uncle showed up. Persy looked confused for a second as we loaded his box of treats, food and new toys into their truck. He wagged his tail first at me, and then (oh, the relief...), at them. They tied him up in the truck bed and drove away. I cried more when I saw him hang his head over the edge, looking back at me. I cried while I walked to the mail box. I cried when I got into bed at home.

And then this poem came back to me, perhaps in my sleep. Perhaps the next morning, which looked as sad as I felt-full of fog and misty rain:

"I wanted to give you not was but is.
Love, all I could build to give you is this"

It had always seemed to me so melancholy, until I thought of my parting conversation with Lorraine.

"Do you eat fish? Salmon? I just feel like I should send you something. I can't thank you enough."

About B. and his efforts and his serious little face over his math homework, and how instead of getting testy, he'd finally started to smile at me instead.

About all my friends. The new ones. The old ones. The ones I've yet to make. About how this is, indeed, a two-line testament to what we're all doing, in AmeriCorps, and in our daily lives.

We are not here to do what's "right"-should I have sent Persy back, not knowing if he'd be well taken care of? What about B.? How do I know what's right for him?

We're not here to do what's definitively "right", or to tell someone what's wrong. We're not here to do things by the book, nor to do whatever we want.

We come here, and we do our best. We do the best we can. We build our own this: our own little towers of heartache and compassion and pride, and we stand beside them, knowing that they still stand, no matter how crumpled, no matter not white nor picket.

We do what we're asked, and more. We do the best we can, always.

* from "Late Valentines" by Derick W. Burleson (Never Night, pub. Marick Press)

Little Hamlet By the Sea

I can't believe I live here...

It had never occurred to me that I might fall immediately in love with this new place, and yet it's happened. We're right on the water. The fog rolls in off the strait and covers everything at night. The atmosphere and sea-smell are similar to coastal Alaska, and there are gulls and seals and otters in the harbor. All weekend long I drifted around the docks looking at boats: trawlers, sloops, dories, dinghies, and long-liners, inlaid with hardwood or mother-of-pearl. Boats that people live on, handcrafted, that are a way to make a living but more than that, here, a way of life.

I've met so many people, and absorbed so much information in the last week and a half. There are 40 volunteers with the North Olympic Corps this year-more than they have ever had. And every single one of us brings something enlightening and new to the table. It was incredible to be welcomed to the job and this new place by an entire group of people who are cohesive, united in our differences perhaps more than our similarities. Whether it's at work, or sitting around at the local pub over beers at dusk, or wandering around town, I've been impressed upon by our backgrounds and stories, by how much everyone wants to be here, and how certain we all are of what we're doing here, and why.

It was difficult to leave Alaska, knowing that it's home, having thought that I'd never feel comfortable somewhere else. My sense of community was eroding, though, worn down by more frequent instances of violence in the city, by the feeling that something was missing, and not knowing what. I feel here like a child must when learning to walk: surrounded by things that are stunning, fragrant, delicious and now attainable. We are all embarking on the missions we set for ourselves out of altruism, preparing to work on improving the environment, housing, education, and the lives of children. There are festivals and live music and fruit trees laden with pickable things.

I am taking my first steps. I am rushing headlong into the world, to make it the world I want it to be. Volunteers will be awarded exactly $11,800 in stipend/living allowance for an entire year. Most of us have applied for food stamps, heating assistance, and transportation assistance.

I have never been so rich.

You're a poem of mystery/You're the prayer inside me.

So I'm stubborn. Ruthlessly so. When it comes to taking someone's advice in regards to music or movies or which book to read, I tend to adamantly refuse to do so until weeks or months after the fact. The lines that title this blog are part of an Iron & Wine song; Iron & Wine being a band I flatly refused to listen to, simply because everyone and their dog seemed bent on telling me how good they were. How I'd probably never heard of them. I'm stubborn about taking advice. I'm stubborn about letting go.

I let go totally once. Three-quarters of the way up a mountain face, trying to run a line back down, dangling from a thin, green-barked tree. Hanging into a glacial waterfall.

To be fair, I didn't get hooked on a 'pure' Iron & Wine album, but rather a collaborative EP called "The In the Reins EP". Iron & Wine collaborated with a band called Calexico to produce the record, and it is this record's title track that's caught me thus: a low-toned string harmony behind a deceptively simple-sounding acoustic guitar. And then out of nowhere, a deep, strident voice that sings over the instrumental in Spanish.

The singer sounds like he's ready to give up, and yet, is still noble, and there's a nobility to that, too, isn't there? Being left standing alone and choosing not to follow what's moving away from you. I lost my line coming down the scree. I had no choice but to leave it. The sun was out.

Iron & Wine came to Anchorage last year. By the time I caught wind of it, the shows were both sold out. Back then I didn't really care. I wasn't aware of the EP that would knock my wind out. Of course, back then, I didn't know why I'd want it to, why I needed the strings and that noble Spanish verse. I didn't know that without them, I couldn't cry.

The sun was out but glacial runoff is never, never warm. It was either this, or go back up the mountain. And the tree was slick, so I let it go.

It terrifies me that it's all out there now, here, typefaced and silhouetted against, well, the Internet. As if by my own hand, by choosing to put it into words, I've already lost you. Oh, not entirely. You'll resurface someday, while I'm still chilled from this fall, from the lung-crushing weight of the plunge, legs shaking, chest contracted. You'll say hello, maybe. Maybe you'll ask how things are for me. You may very well say nothing at all.

Because that's how cold it is, how indescribably cold, that water. And I knew I could get out of it, and the heat still beat down on the top of my head, while above me the scree rattled: another runner coming down, someone else either very confident, or completely lost.

I'm stubborn, you see. Stubborn about letting go. Save for that one time, just once, up high on a mountain whose jagged scree and dusty, narrow trails cradled me. Save for the day we met, the day you walked out into the sun from the confines of a coffee shop and shook my hand.

Behind me the little tree snaps back into shape. In front of me, though I don't know it yet, you bend to pet my dog, the straighten again. Somewhere in the middle, I'm holding out for the sight of the trail again. Somewhere in the middle, I'm holding onto you.

But I knew this was it, didn't I? I knew the second I laid eyes on you that in one way or another, this would be it for me. I repeat this over and over and over, to anyone who asks. To some who don't.

I turn the first track of my first Iron & Wine album on again. And I run, now, years after cutting my shins & bruising my hands on the rocks on that mountain. Outside where it rains, where the rain makes tears and sweat taste like the grass that grows where river meets sea. And sometimes I find I can cry.

And most days, I find, one or two things drop, like my body from the cliff face, like a bird diving for moths. Most days, I find, I let a little more go.

Glen Alps/ Flat Top with Jason

On Tuesday I spent almost 5 hours hiking around a popular area outside Anchorage: Flat Top Peak. The weather was perfect, a sky so blue it seemed false. My friend Jason & I made it a point to climb the peak all the way to the top, which, strenuous though it is, provides a breathtaking view of the city, Cook Inlet, and the mountains surrounding the sea. The below pictures from the hike make me wonder how I can leave this place at all...

Family Reunion & Pauling Wedding Reception, Summer 2010

A week spent celebrating family with my dad's side:
Aunt Beth & Uncle Lance & Cousin Kim
Aunt Jenny, Uncle Randy, Cousins Andrew, Jo, and Beau (cousin in law)
Grandma Jo (Dad's mom)
Annie & Dave, Cousins Adrienne, Tommy & Ryan (cousin in law)

My brothers, brother's fiancee Sally, my sister, Asia (Daniel's girlfriend) and Hector (Anna's boyfriend)

It was also the first time our family was able to celebrate Adrienne & Ryan's marriage. Here are a few shots from the weekend:

Plans to make plans to make plans...

August.

It's been raining here constantly, save the weekend we all packed up and hiked into Crow Pass, where Eagle River was pouring over its banks, flooding the trail, soaking our boots. Chilling our bodies when we stopped to take a dip, to cool off, to remind ourselves how small we are, how powerful, how willing to carry things.

Family reunion time. We've all gathered in four houses, three motorhomes, and a tumble of catching-up. There are bonfires and homebrew, and lasagna in huge cast-iron pots, table settings full of flowers and seashells. Wedding presents. My brothers are here. My cousins. My sister. My parents and grandmother. And soon we'll all be leaving again, our reunion a brief respite from the weight of oneself in the world-it doesn't seem so bad when someone is there to pat you on the shoulder, to hug you, to offer you the last scoop of cookie dough, the first one fresh from the oven.

Where I'm going is coastal mountain range. Where I'm going, there are marine highways and colonies of writers and music festivals. Where I'm going is the sea.

My cousin and her high school sweetheart will celebrate their wedding tomorrow, surrounded by all of us, raucous and giddy on my uncle's homemade wines. My brother and his fiancee arrive tonight-her engagement ring is perfect, at least that's what everyone says. My sister and her boyfriend will be there, his hand on the small of her back like always. And there will be our parents, and our aunts and uncles, and their friends, happy in the longevity of their lives together, content to watch.

There's still a picture or two of us somewhere. In one, we're slid together in a bar booth, the light low and our heads together, our smiles the same, eyes cast down on your camera, revisiting a moment that was only moments ago.

In the other, we're up on a mountain somewhere in the Tombstone range, and you're holding the camera at arms' length. Our hair is longer now, and you haven't shaved. I'm half-hidden behind you, my knees supporting your torso, and you're smiling, but only part of the way, mouth turned up in the way I love, because it mirrors how you look while someone else talks story, like you're getting ready to have something to say.

And it's dim in one and bright in the other. And it doesn't matter how different each image is. It doesn't matter that nothing's the same.

All around me, people are putting their lives together, grafting them like cuttings from one tree onto the next. In three weeks, I'll leave here, where those pictures were taken.

I'll be off, somewhere, bearing your weight against my legs, bearing this like I bore your body on mine, your face pressed into my neck.

All around me, there will still be mountains, still the dim lights of booths or campfires.

My heart is breaking. My heart is broken, and I've never been so full of joy.

You'd never know, would you, 'cause you don't ever ask...

I'd pay money.
... I'd pay money to be allowed to love you the way I already do...


CIVILIZATION

There’s an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoing-ness like
that of song until at last

it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing . . . You’re the same
wilderness you’ve always

been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So he said,
in a dream. But

the rest of it—all the rest—
was waking: more often
than not, to the next
extravagance. Two blackamoor
statues, each mirroring

the other, each hoisting
forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
peacock feathers. Don’t
you know it, don’t you know

I love you, he said. He was
shaking. He said,
I love you. There’s an art
to everything. What I’ve
done with this life,

what I’d meant not to do,
or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
no regrets. Not the broken but
still flowering dogwood. Not

the honey locust, either. Not even
the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
every shadow is memory,
memory . . . As he said to me

once, That’s all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
because addicted—do:
resigned all over again. It

only looked, it—
It must only look
like leaving. There’s an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How

eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in. How they made
out of shamelessness something
beautiful, for as long as they could.

Carl Phillips

Brevity.

I'd like some anonymity.
I'd like to disappear.
I'd like to be where no one knows me, by face or by name or by my tenuous attachments to other people.

I sat not so long ago in a coffee shop in Warsaw and was identifiably only by the tiny cup of espresso I ordered, by my muddy-hemmed jeans, by the pen in my hand.

I'd like to go back there.
I'd like for no one to look me in the eye.

"They love each other/There is no loneliness like theirs."

-James Wright

This poem seems so applicable in so many ways today.

Yesterday I held some of the strongest, bravest, 'toughest' men I know while they cried. Some of them tried to hide it behind sunglasses, like grieving widows or mob bosses in the movies. Some didn't hide anything at all. Their noses ran, their hands shook around my shoulders.

They all clung to me like somehow I might give them some answers. Like they wanted to be held by their mothers or wives, but had neither, anymore.

Yesterday was the first time in two years I'd ever seen Choi look old. We all look up to him, if for no other reason, as impenetrable. At almost 60 years old, he still has the body that a lifetime of hard work and hard fighting gave him. He is the embodiment of the banners in the gym that he likes to invoke, every time someone pauses jumping rope, or tries to slack and take a round off: Never Give Up. No Sweat, No Champion. Last night, he looked defeated. He wasn't smiling. His head was bowed. He looked his age, instead of twenty years younger.

There is no comfort for that.

Five days ago, all I could think of was that I wanted my mother. We arrived back from camp dusty and exhausted, feeling some small sense of triumph, in that we'd survived four days without running water or electricity while herding other people's kids around, making God's eyes and friendship bracelets and singing "The Bean Song" for hours and hours.

An hour after walking in the door, I was told:

Lucas is dead.
I think we should put it on the shelf.

Disparate statements, to be sure. Funny how we struggle, day after day, to control these small pieces of our lives that calve, like glaciers, away from us. I live in truisms now, the ones I hate, and swore I'd never use. Cliche.

One day at a time.
"For now."
It is what it is.
If it's meant to be...

I can't number the amount of times I've hated the asshole who came up with that one, the one about things that are 'meant to be' coming back to us. But I can't ignore it, insipid as it is, either, can't stop myself from repeating it in the morning in the shower, in the evening curled up in the narrow bed (there's only room for one, you see).

I still want my mother, still want someone else to collect the pieces, to shepherd them back to shore. There are still so many things to look forward to, everyone says. So many things you haven't done. Places left to go. Go.

There is no loneliness like this, is there? I'm rooted in it, stuck in a kitchen chair every morning, stuck in my own head all day. I cling to what I hope will happen, what I want more than anything, a child clinging to a tattered stuffed animal, but the voice of what seems to be reason now has to be my own, so I wake up, and I am startled and then saddened all at once by this emptiness, and I repeat to myself again and again, prying myself away one clenched fist at a time...

Let go. Let go let go let go.

Just When I Think It's All Coming Together...

...something or some things come spectacularly apart.

It hasn't been an easy decision to forego the Peace Corps. You don't just, you know, up and quit that, throw down your apron or your vest with flair or your paper hat and stomp on it. Because, really, how do you 'quit' an ideal? A philanthropy? How do you 'give up on' a life's work?

What are we without what we call the courage of our convictions, without our specific brands of charging in on white horses with banners held high, with swords at the ready, and all that? It's a difficult thing to surmount, when your failure is greater because the endeavor involves what you believe is larger than you are, is a conduit to contribution to what's 'bigger than yourself'.

We're all so convinced, aren't we, of one thing or the other-of our infinite smallness in comparison to the world, to each other; of our invincibility, of how we oversee even what we can't see?

Well, sure then.

What's bigger?

Where do all the bits fit, the bits being us? Into the sectioned and cordoned-off world, the bodegas and favelas and slums. Into the city. Into the mountains or out onto the water. Where do we put all this intention of good, when the first plan fails, and we've failed to make another? What the hell am I supposed to do, I've been asking, with this shambles of a summer-into fall, with the idealism and the enthusiasm I thought I'd built up for sharing it?

Boy oh boy is that a hard question. For a few days, I'd have liked to curl up and give in. To return to making paychecks and paying bills and the unsatisfying currency of the same old same. And yet this is only because I recognize the ease with which I might slide into that trap-the trap we're all in, partially anyway, our entire lives: trapped by comfort, by relative affluence, by how easy it is to un-know. To ignore.

I don't want to do this, this media-driven, culturally-acceptable (not just in North America, but everywhere, somehow) coast through most of life. I'm looking into AmeriCorps now, because, as everyone says, there are problems in this country too, and people in need. Mostly I'm looking into change, a move, to keep moving. Rolling stones, as they say. The adage is true. Much of my disappointment comes from losing the opportunity to travel, to jump off to explore what's over another edge. My disappointment comes from the potential to disappoint others-and yet therein is another comparison: would they love me more if I did more/were more/knew more?

There's that too, isn't there? Love as learning. Learning to love not as you think you deserve, but as the ones you love deserve. And I know through their responses that the people who love me are doing just that, telling me over and over and over again in whichever way they choose that there is a bottom line here, a be-all-end-all: love. Nothing more and nothing less (what is ever more, and who deserves less?).

Oh, these shoes that may never drop, the ones we wait for, heavy with the dirt of what we want, and what we think we need to accomplish. These ways in which we sleep fitfully, wondering when someone will pinch us. I know I'm loved, and am thankful for it eternally.

I know what it is to love in return, and how best to handle, now, the twists and turns I'm given, the evolution, the shocks and bittersweet surprises. The frustrations.

Ask a favor of what you cannot see.
And then?

Count to ten.
Count to ten.
Count to ten.

Hiatus, episode I

Road trip. Canada. Not a jetset, but a hiatus nonetheless. I am going to cold, ear-flap-hat-wearing, cheap-beer-swilling, ice-fishing, beaver-trapping, eh-saying...paradise.

Don't send a search party.

I don't want to come back.


Iggich isuat*

Mountains do not end here.
We’re stuck between them, a dry and winding
road throwing us together—

Aurora and three dogs
and me at the wheel,
victims of last year’s forest fires

sentinel over the pavement,
black and withered,
and Aurora sneaks the dogs

cheese crackers
and tells me how she strips now,
her name’s brilliance

reduced to this: blue and purple
disco lights
flashing

on the parts of herself
she hides now in scarves, in long hemp
skirts, just as her face was hidden

when I picked her up,
thumbing her way back to town
215 miles from home,

and we share the last cheese cracker
while the mountains siphon
us from the city,

burnt cottonwoods’ limbless trunks
soaking up our talk like water,
like Aurora’s dream

of planting strawberries next year
is the river they long for,
the glacial blue

nourishment they so desperately need.

All you need is love: They weren't lying.

I wonder if anyone else has ever felt this way: as if there's a vessel connecting the heart to the world itself, to the faceless, nameless, malleable world, a conduit for all its components-

shame, winter, sheets of kelp washing ashore, happiness, the way it feels to lie in a melting snowbank with the sun shining.

For me, it is impossible to block any of this out, to continue life in the relative cloister of my own apartment, the breakfast table, the short & dusty streets between one errand and the next. I know so many people (so many people I love, good people, the best) whose lives consist of this, a sort of confluence of domesticity and fear. They call themselves merely "realistic" or "cautious". They relate stories of relatives who've had their purses stolen, their trust misused. They don't do well at disguising their inherent mistrust of the world, of the people in it, and most of all at their own ability to adapt, to leave a zone of comfort and handle what's being presented to them.

...when I get to feeling like a Dust Bowl-era photograph, I have to leave, or fall in love...scores of people trudging down the walks, heads bent against a punishing wind...

That's what, I assume, it must feel like to be truly stuck, but 'stuck' is a state not of the mind but in the heart, a clogged line, an obstruction in that what we're doing seems to represent that in which we have faith. We had faith,

once, that digging this posthole and standing this solid piece of wood, and framing our lives like houses might be enough,

was what it took to build a life in the first place: a checklist of things one is supposed to have, according to someone else. We had faith that we'd be happy with materials, prefabricated. These people I know-they've had faith all their lives that they'd be left alone, free to

block the interchange of story & song & news about the weather if they choose to. To misunderstand and point fingers. Trudging on & on & on through a world they'd rather be closed to.

My friends have varying opinions. Some say it's ridiculous. Some think it's cute. Most just nod & smile, as if they know something I don't, when in fact they're hiding that they don't know anything about it at all,

the way a windstorm frightens someone into running outside, to cover the plants and hide the tools, forgetting to stand straight into it, to let it sweep through, blow something clean, leave something precious behind.

And they all do that, this rag-tag band of travelers, workers, & erstwhile thieves, the ones I let in to sleep on the couch, to share a meal & a beer, they all leave behind a little bit. Maybe a tiny gift (like the miniature jade elephants that hang from my pack straps, a gift from Shin of China, because I made dinner for her.) Maybe the soil from the soles of their shoes that reminds me it's time to be moving on myself, soon. Maybe just

a dozen different memories, all overwhelming, like something so truly joyous and funny that you've got to throw your head back to let the laughter out.

...I wonder how we survive without this, without the authenticity of other people, without some connection to the world that precludes self-preservation, without the little hairpin turns we take to move away from what's safe and comfortable and toward each other, toward what the world becomes through the eyes of others. I wonder what happens when literalism enters the phrase "You can't see the forest for the trees", when we drive on past the mountains without seeing them, without their pitch & peak entering us somehow, making us a little newer.

This happens to me every day-these minor movements like the pieces of a symphony, these little ways my heart is open & willing, willing even to be hurt or filled with sadness for the ways we hurt the land we live on, the people we live here with.

We all went out last weekend, the lovers, the dreamers, and me. We talked about places we'd already been. We talked about going back. We tore the world apart with our critiques and our senses of humor. We put it back together with our dancing. We petted dogs & walked on the trails,

where the sun over the inlet is like a bowl, its obstructed half full of cloud & snowstorm & blue.

I've never laughed so much in my life, & the vessel that is my heart is overflowing now, a surfeit of new friends & old ones, of implicit trust in the world, of backpacks & guitars & plans for everyone's future but our own. Full of uncertainty.

It feels a little like pain, this fullness of heart, like the whole world is trying to get in all at once, & just as I think I can't take it, someone says something funny, & we all laugh, & my sides are aching, and I think I can fly.

I know I can.
I know I can.
I know you can, too.

Letters I'll Never Send: II. A premature baby, or preemie, is born before the 37th week of pregnancy.

You weighed about 2 pounds when you were born. We have a picture of you as a baby, just curled up in your dad's softball glove. My Mom


Mom,

It isn't fair.

I know you hate foul language, but it isn't fucking fair.

I tell everyone I have to believe in the inherent goodness, of everything. Of people. Of many people thrown together. Of the cosmos. Of God or whatever. I believe this because of you. Because of Dad. Because two people who thought it was the right thing to do picked a scrawny, sickly baby out of an adoption catalog, and paid the money, and signed the forms, and gave that baby a better life.

That baby was me.

And here's the thing: that's all they're trying to do, too, Mom. They're just trying to have a baby and give that baby a good life. And that baby is small, Mom, smaller even than I was, just a pin's head on a chart somewhere, on a screen that monitors vital signs: lung sounds, brain waves, heart.

How do you measure heart? How do you reach in and feel around and come up with the strength it takes to survive, to thrive against the odds everyone's set for you? They just want what you and Dad wanted: a healthy, happy kid. Someone to call their own. He's got needles in him, Mom, and IVs, and every day something else seems to go wrong, but we all keep hoping, don't we? We all keep saying 'it'll be OK'.

Because it has to be.

Because if it's not, it means that awful, unthinkable, unjust things happen to good people. To the best people you know.

To people who deserve happiness in ways that only those who have suffered prejudice and funny looks and snide comments and heartache deserve to be happy.

Because I'll lose it, Mom, if it's not OK.

I have to believe this, that the world is a just place. A place where a couple of good people who love each other can decide to spread that love to another being, can bring that being into the world and can raise it to love like they do.

And here's the weird part, the part no one will understand, the part that sounds crazy: I envy them this.

If you read the things she's written, maybe you'd see the picture too, the tableau in your head of how we hold on, one to another. The misty and blue-tinted portrait of what it means to love, when one's a seething ball of rage and worry and grieving and the other's got her legs in the air, trying desperately to hold life inside, hospital-gowned and prone.

Maybe you'd see what it means to love, when the chips are really down, when the whole table's been overturned. When you think you can't.

Because even if this does go south, even if this does go the way that everyone' dreading it will, won't they really, truly still have each other?

And most days, this is what I envy, Mom. This is where I see you, see Dad at the bassinet in the middle of the night, or in the dark at our house, when the power's out and all six of us are crying. I see the hard times, the penny-pinching, and then I see us all now, twenty-some-odd years later, knowing our Mom and Dad are still together.

Most days my heart aches, and there's no one there to share it.

It's not that love is pain. It's the other way around, the burden we try to take from one another, the hurt we don't try to hide, because we don't have to.

We're all praying for this tiny baby, in any way we know how.

Somewhere in the southern states, they're doing it too, hands clasped, voices quiet. And if it comes to that, they'll still be together, a tensed muscle and a contracting pain. A wave of hurt and an inadvertent outcry. What it means to force it, to strain, to cling a little. What it is to cry and to cry, and to refuse to let it all go.

They'll still have each other.

What is it that's I've got?

Letters I'll Never Send: I. "Thousands of demonstrators stormed a government building and imposed their own "people's governor". "

Scores of people lost their lives. More than 400 were injured. This is the day that changed the course of history in this small, mountainous former Soviet state. The BBC News

Love,

We miss so much here by way of revolution. Our news talks of the 'revolution' of the iPad, or on some runway in NYC. Things are 'revolutionized' every day: the blender, the espresso machine, the vacuum cleaner.

Who gives a shit?

They're revolting over there, love, where I'm supposed to go, an orange-hued spatter on a map of the world that I've rested the next two years of my life upon. Thrown a dart at it, and hoped it might hit. Light years. It's taking light years to reach the dartboard, and yet, in a day's time, the real revolution has rained down on that country, and now I'm keeping vigil, like so many others I know, waiting and wondering. It's a question for a WANTED poster: dead or alive?

It's not just my friend I worry for. I worry for myself, because these things are not, ever, unselfish. What kinds of new bureaucracy arise from an emergency state? I don't know if, or where, they'll send me now. I only know I don't want to be here, here where you can have only as many branches as your social network, who you've had drinks with over the weekend, here where the mountains-the very monoliths I escape into-are closing in around me, reminding me what I've not done, what I've yet to do. I've rested the next 24 months on this, on a village and a classroom and a landscape I've never seen, a language I've never spoken, an absence of things I've never lacked: perhaps running water, perhaps heat, perhaps you.

I miss you, too, the revolution/revelation of the smallness of your bed, the impossibility of sleeping apart. And this frightens me too-the ease with which we disappear into our individual continents: the bodies we shore up against, the dreams we pursue that finally consume us. What if there's revolt where I am too, where I am when I think of you: the certain shape of your lips and the cadence of your speech overrun by water, by the landslide of distance, of the way we say nothing when we do speak.

What if there's a revolt where they send me, where the people have been rising, for years, to this explosion of ideal, of anger against injustice?

What if I never get there?

These days, the sun rises early here. I drive through it every morning: the confluence of winter and spring, clearness and cloud, mountain peak and sky. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful place on Earth, I'd say, even knowing there's so much of this place I've not seen, will never see. I don't miss you yet, for all I don't know.

I miss this already.

A world away, they're shooting policemen, searching for equal representation. The streets are red. My friend is buried in all of this, not responsive; no on can raise him, though god knows we've tried.

By nine in the morning, the sunlight is the color of asphalt. I'm waiting. I'm keeping a vigil for him, for these countries, for the ways you never kissed me on our first night together, alone.

More recent wall-oems

Note: 'Snyder' refers to poet and writer Gary Snyder. If you've never read him, I suggest you do...

And Snyder's been speaking to me all day, about 'wild' and what it means and how its only voice is ours, stilted with long un-greenness, a young raven calling like a cracked brass bell out across the snow, and there you are in that small town, and here I am in mine, no wilder today than when we first met, talking endlessly of the long way out, sustenance for our mutual loneliness abundant but parched, like crowberries shriveled and dried over winter, like the liquid sieved from the moss.

In seven hours, it's easy to say that one's done nothing, and that we did, winding driving through your favorite canyon, as if we moved through time and space like the stars do, hurtling past one another, stopping finally for black coffee at the diner, where, slowed to our real speed, the snow ceased to slant and fell straight down instead, a white curtain, lines of flakes like bits of data on a screen, dates, times, speed limits, our need to stay together one hour more, overnight, into the next day.

I hurry up and wait: for the ice surrounding the lakes to melt, for the sodden ground to dry, for wild things hibernating to rise and stretch and begin to eat, tearing down the new grass, the blossoms on the willows, the sharp shoots of fireweed that rush up the hillsides. I hurry up and wait: the days are not yet long enough, and the mated pair of eagles, snowy heads and black, black wings, rest hours at a time in the tree across the street. I wait for the hurry to begin, for the frenzy of dinners and drinks and the rush of melting snow, the newborn rivers and streams, the smell of glacier and silt and movement rising out of water that will someday chill, will soon enough freeze, will force us all into slumber, to wait out the perpetual night, wait for the blessed thaw.