this is a conversation with Jasper

“You start in diapers and you end in diapers,” said Jasper. He was talking about his grandmother, who traveled with them from Oxnard up to Gualala, and how the trip was long, because they kept stopping to change her diaper.

“Can she walk?” I asked.

“Yeah, she can walk,” he answered. “But she doesn’t have much of a short-term memory. She can remember things clearly from twenty, thirty years ago though.”

“That seems to be pretty common,” I said.

We made small talk like this over the phone, grazing, like cows, on this and then that, various patches of roughage. Nothing seemed all that important, and yet the conversation took on the pleasant rhythms of household tasks, like chopping Brussels sprouts.

We talked about the tiny house he is hoping to build, the goat farm he is moving to at the end of the month, and Virginia's work at non-profits.

“What’s Virginia doing?” I asked, about his girlfriend.

“You mean right now? Or generally?”

“Generally.”

“Well, she was working for a small non-profit… and then that failed… and now that non-profit is a pile of ashes, from which something could rise, maybe. And then she went to another non-profit, but I think after this experience, she’s probably going to stay away from non-profits for the rest of her life.”

“Not surprised…good experience though?”

“Maybe,” he replied. “She just spent all day asking rich people for money.”

“That’s how it usually is,” I said.

He was hoping that maybe someday communism would work. I said that while the theory has some goodness, it would never work in practice because people are innately evil and corrupt.

“People tend towards destruction…they want to break things,” I said. “People are selfish and greedy. They have to overcome these fundamental instincts to do any good in the world.”

“I try not to be so cynical,” he countered.

“In my day-to-day interactions with people, I’m fairly optimistic—I give most people the benefit of the doubt. I assume the best. But in mass, I am cynical.”

And then we talked about what it meant to do good, practically; how to balance personal freedom and meaning with the greater good of others, especially when they're not exactly aligned (most of the time). Being true to your self, he said, could also be extremely selfish, he said, referring to the old hippies he grew up among in Mendocino.

“I can see that,” I said, “and wariness about selfishness is good, but I think that authenticity—to one’s self—is a service to the world. You can contribute more of yourself, give more, and bless the people around you.”

Even as I said these things to Jasper, inside I was doubting my every word. There was no certainty of these statements, which we could only talk about in the abstract, hypothesizing as we tried to form these general principles and answer these looming questions that confront us everyday. How clear it is that I know so little. To be humble, as an explorer, is to know that you are a conqueror of nothing; is to know that what you think you know with certainty, might not be certain at all.

We didn’t reach any conclusions about anything, except that I would go to Mendocino sometime later this year, and that he would come to San Francisco, but the conversation, in all its musing and muttering, seemed important somehow.

“Maybe we can just start with the Hippocratic Oath,” he said, which is the oath that many physicians swear when they begin their practice. I think he meant ahimsa, the Sanskrit word for “do no harm," but I said nothing.


A note:

I plan to write on this blog more, so bear with me, as the volume increases, so the fragmentation, the disorientation, the half-formed thoughts and susurrations will increase too—at least initially.

this is a divergence

I’ve been telling people that I’m quitting my job, which began, first as a declaration of liberation, an expression of self; then as a method of public accountability. Now that quitting is definitive, telling others has become less for my own self-assurance and validation—which it certainly was for awhile—and more about other people’s reaction. Strong statements elicit strong reactions, and strong reactions about trivial things—where strong reactions are permissible and not highly provocative—say a lot about a person, more than they’d like to give away, perhaps.

“I’m quitting my job!” I say. “Congratulations! That’s great!” some reply, a reaction I like of course, because it validates my decision. These people see quitting—destabilization—as a good thing. They see the freedom from corporations and the financial agendas of tech monoliths. Perhaps they value exploration and are comfortable with the unknown.

Others immediately reply, “Why?” “For what?” “What’s the next step?” or even “Why would you quit a job when you don’t have something else lined up?” They expect that I’m trading up for another job—something “better,” which for many people, I’m assuming, is more prestige, more money, more renown. I am trading up, but my better is not another job; it is not higher pay. There is no plan. That’s the point.

I sense unease when I say I do not know, when I admit there is no direction; and perhaps I am particularly sensitive to that unease because I have felt it myself, like a beating drum in my stomach: the insecurity, the fear, the doubt, the vertigo! I have interrogated myself like a suspect. I have let waves wash over me, forgetting to dive under. The great-tailed grackles are hidden in the trees, squawking loudly, incessantly, perilously.

I am at once terrified and excited to find myself in a forest without a compass.

“You quit your house and country, quit your ship, and quit your companions in the tent, saying, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’ The light on the far side of the blizzard lures you. You walk, and one day you enter the spread heart of silence, where lands dissolve and seas become vapor and ices sublime under unknown stars. This is the end of the Via Negativa, the lightless edge where the slopes of knowledge dwindle, and love for its own sake, lacking an object, begins.” (Annie Dillard, “An Expedition to the Pole”)

“There is no movement without direction,” I wrote, in a farewell letter to my boss. “One step follows another.” Robert Frost said it better: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way…”

I could only give an explanation for my leaving in the abstract, because going outside, somewhere, for some time—just taking a breather, I suppose—isn’t a place or a person or a destination. Without form, it doesn't make logical sense. It doesn't make sense the way we hike on paved trails that are already marked on maps for us. Not to make sense of the wilderness, but to give a sense of it, I began the letter this way: “Lately I have been overwhelmed by the density and gravity of language—I can only hope this note is as whole and dense and weighty and expansive as the sentiment it is trying to contain… or swallow,” and then I quoted Gertrude Stein, because she says it better than I do: “I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do.”

These dead poets have refined me, opened me. They are alive to me, writing to me. I am strumming my own vocal chords, trying to hear my own voice.

“The Greek term HYPOMONE is translated as ‘patience, enduring perseverance, and fortitude,’” I continued in my letter. “It indicates a ‘dwelling in the moment,’ an ‘actively entering into the thick of life.’ I hope HYPOMONE characterizes these months ahead of me, in which I enter into an unbounded unknown. I’ve never done that before. I’ve always known what was the next step. But this is a risk I have to take—I have to be willing to risk my comfort, my familiarity, my security.”

"Quit" comes from the old French word quiter, which is an action verb meaning, "clear, establish one's innocence"—from harm, from guilt. Quitting, then, if in keeping with its etymology, is not to remove, or to absent oneself; it is to establish something else entirely. It is to establish innocence, which is a particular freedom, a particular kind of a primordial, Edenic presence in which the mind and the heart are clear—the clear in which you can hear the wind chimes, the crickets, the cicadas, the howling coyotes. There is fog, of course. There will always be fog in this city, and I am okay not seeing farther than a few feet ahead of me. I am, I will be, learning how to live in the fog, which is really just mystery made literal. Mystery, not mastery.


“You can’t see the whole path ahead, but there is usually enough light to take the next step.”
-Henri Nouwen

this is a prayer for Delia

A Prayer for Delia

We are gathered here today
as a congregation of beloved souls
who know not the extent
of the love bestowed
upon us before we were outlined
a shadow in the womb, before the brethren
to whom we are beholden breathed into us, before
and after we were broken and broke
the fragile glass upon which our existence is
perched.
Even when we find ourselves in the darkness,
the darkness is not who we are.
We are not without love
the way that trees cannot
without roots.
Even when we are in the spaces between
the forest trees know about us,
the dark is because there are
limbs above us shading our brows reaching
heavenward on our behalf and there are fallen
limbs supine on the ground
prostrating in tongues
we know not, giving themselves back
to the land from which they came.
There is silent growing stronger beneath.

this is the commonplace

This essay was originally posted on Medium in the Human Parts collection.

A train ride from San Francisco to Oakland is more efficient and straightforward than a series of bus rides from the Mission to North Beach, even though the latter distance is a quarter of the former. I make the trans-Bay trip often, and have done so since I first moved to San Francisco. Many important men in my life have stumbled into residences in the Fruitvale neighborhood (or should I say, I have stumbled into many men with residences in the Fruitvale neighborhood, or both), which is strange, because it is a sparsely inhabited, shabby, industrial area, with warehouses and junkyards and detritus on the sidewalks. There are no hot destinations or sleekly designed coffee bars, only an occasional fluorescent-lit taco truck doubling as a landmark. It is not a beautiful neighborhood. But there is space — cheap, inhabitable, open space.

Tonight I ride over with ginger beer, chips, salsa, and several books in tow. At the Fruitvale station, I rouse the man next to me who is slumped over his backpack sleeping, a first nap, I’m guessing, after a few nights on the street, an assumption I derive from the sourness of his body odor. I look for Josh’s car, a faded bronze Camry with the word “DAD” in its license plate. We drive two minutes to a complex of gate-locked warehouses where he and Carlos live. 

The night begins with a bag of chips, which we dump onto the table and dip into salsa. For some people, eating is a task necessary for survival, performed only to mitigate the sharpest pangs of hunger. By the rate at which Josh and Carlos are eating, like factory workers on break — silently, intently, quickly — it is clear that they are in survival mode. I know many men like this, who prefer liquids to solids, relying on the former to function and the latter to live. 

To prevent wood dust from rising, the boys have just put up a brown burlap curtain, which you have to peel off your face and push to the left when climbing the stairs to the living quarters up above, which is two hammocks slung perpendicular to each other, shelves of neatly stacked pants, suspended racks of shirts and sweaters, a coffee bar, piles of books beside a worn yellow armchair, a kitchen sink without a garbage disposal, and a modest rectangular dining table. Small, delicate plants like succulents and orchids abound amidst congeries of wooden objects and implements, arranged neatly on the surfaces they have created. 

I remember when there was nothing there, just bare white walls — a wide, open canvas. That first night, we christened the place with an easy dinner, managed with very little dishware: roasted sweet potatoes, eggs, corn tortillas, sautéed zucchini, spinach, beer — whatever we could find at the bodega nearby. 

The meal was strangely delicious, all of it. The space was empty, but Josh and Carlos were giddy about the possibilities it held, about building and creating a home for themselves, about an intentional household filled with things they loved and desired, and after they put up the first shelves, we sat around the table and talked until I cried, which was both embarrassing and I’m sure, memorable, and those memories at the very beginning, even when there was nothing there, were the start of something, this growth of people into a space and then the growth of the space itself and then the community coming into it and all the stories pouring out of it. 

There were the beginnings of the wood shop, which was the dream all along, down in the dusty dark space below. Machines arrived one by one, saws and lathes and woodcutters that I will not be able to tell you about. Then the work table was built, and the wood glues and the tools were put into their containers and arranged on the shelves, the trash bin filled with wood scraps. Along the wall there are severed tree stumps. The dream was to build and to build with friends, to work, to teach, to commune, to gather.

Tonight we are working on two live edge wood slabs, propped up onto four tree stumps. Ginger beers popped open, Blood Orange on high. I’m wearing black leggings, black boots, and a long black tunic with jagged edges and an asymmetrical hem. “You need woodworking clothes,” Carlos says, pointing to the draping edges of my top. “That’s not going to be safe.”

I change into a long grey t-shirt, and then Carlos hands me a scraper to start smoothing out the edges. To demonstrate, he stands with his body perpendicular to the slab, and runs the scraper lengthwise, where the bark meets the flesh of the wood. He scrapes forcefully, rhythmically, easily. 

He hands me the scraper and tells me to start scraping. It’s an easy task that requires no dexterity, but like a gangly foal, I don’t yet know how to arrange my body so that the movement feels natural. The hesitance one feels in her first encounters with the motions of a particular or peculiar activity — driving a stick-shift, vaulting over a twenty-foot pole, handling a blunderbuss — is the same hesitance one feels in the face of a stranger, the same unfamiliarity that demands self-censorship or self-guarding or self-protection against the embarrassment of misstep, a projectile motion that is outside of one’s control. The possibility of havoc is palpable. 

When I first start scraping the wood, my movements are awkward, but the rhythmic repetition — a hundred practice rounds of the very same motion — squashes the strangeness quickly; my arm and my body are acclimating to — and then striking — the sweet sound of metal peeling off wood. Josh is sanding the edge of the other slab, directly behind me, and wood dust is permeating the entire room. Behind my face mask — which, because of my race, makes me look like a hypochondriac during a SARS scare — a layer of grime mixes with sweat, which, after ten minutes of scraping, is profuse. After a day of floating through the black hole of cyberspace, the nighttime calisthenics of woodworking is actually a relief. 

I am kneeling in piles of wood scrapings, which look like thicker, larger pencil shavings, and they’re sticking to my skin and to my leggings, and they’re entering the crevices between my boot and my sock. I’m dirty and sweaty and I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, but as I push and pull the scraper against the wood, perfecting the motion and the sound, I sink deeper into a space of freewheeling thoughts, akin only to meditation, or being on drugs, or swimming. It is a rare and overwhelming state of being in which I see beyond the present moment, see the present within a totality of moments, and it is as Aldous Huxley describes in Doors of Perception, a moment in which I am “capable of remembering all that has ever happened to [me] and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.” This capacity is more a sensation than a fact, an anomaly more than a regularity; it is a capacity for gratitude, for awe of divine orchestration. 

I suddenly possess an awareness of what I can only clumsily describe as sacred serendipity, a series of unforeseeable events, a specific, one-in-a-million permutation of encounters that have made this moment, this right-here-right-now, possible. There was the moving to San Francisco, the decision to come home, the breakup, the search for community, the finding a church, the intersection of strangers, the becoming of friends, the apartment, the realization of the wood shop dream, the collaboration, the wood slabs propped up in a dark warehouse in the south of San Francisco, the unknowing decisions, the Monday delivery, the train, the willingness, the togetherness, every small choice, action, happenstance leading up to this moment, right now. How do you remain indifferent, disenchanted in the face of that? Only the soul-less are blind to the wonder of mysteries. 

Jack Gilbert, poet of my soul, wrote a poem called “Highlights and Interstices” in which he mourns the commonplace he can no longer remember, not the major life decisions (the job-quitting, the moving away, the falling in love) but the interstitial moments of the quotidian, whose pathos is derived from their loss. This is nostalgia in the wake of absence, a sorrow evoked by the absorption of one’s own amnesia. 

We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional

And sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,

Vacations and emergencies. The uncommon parts.

But the best is often when nothing is happening.

The way a mother picks up the child almost without

Noticing and carries her across Waller Street

While talking with the other woman. What if she

Could keep all of that? Our lives happen between

The memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual

Breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about

Her is that commonplace I can no longer remember

The uncommon parts, which are the two thousand habitual breakfasts with Michiko, which are the commonplace he and I and you can no longer remember, which are between the memorable, which are the ordinary ephemera we view mostly with indifference and sometimes with weariness — these are the things Emily is saying goodbye to at the end of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, when she comes back to her life a ghost and laments all the things she did not notice when she was still alive. “Let’s really look at one another!,” she exclaims, “It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.” She takes one last glance at the clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers and the ironed dresses and the hot baths and says, “Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

The question is seemingly rhetorical, but the stage manager answers, “No.” He pauses. “The saints and poets, maybe they do some,” he adds. 

Woodworking is the totality of a thousand unseen movements. It is the product of a vision that transmogrifies through a thousand repetitions and a thousand more slight adjustments. Inspiration crystallizes in the process of doing, in the exercise of patience and persistence as one works towards the shape of something beyond the present moment. Art requires an awareness of the gravity of every gesture and turn; the art is in the intention as much as in the result. The work of saints and poets is not merely reflection, but repetition, cradled in a constant reverence of the ordinary. When for a single transcendent moment, I can see, like Emily’s ghost, not only what is in front me, but what has passed, and is about to pass, and has culminated as the sum of so many passings, I find meaning; I find faith; I find God. 

Had we not been so tired, we would have forgotten to eat, but after a couple hours in the shop, we were tired of dust and sweat and sound. So we stepped out and drove aimlessly in search of food, stopping at a small Burmese restaurant in Alameda where we ate salads, chewy lotus chips, and lettuce cups filled with chicken. We drank cloying ginger honey tea, while chewing, mostly silently, in a booth by the window. The full moon outside was large and weighty and low, as if its place in the night sky was unusually precarious; it looked ready to drop, like the Times Square Ball, into a sea of unknowing bodies. 

Outside the train station, we sat in the car in the dark, waiting for the minutes to pass before the train to San Francisco came through the station. Nineteen minutes. Our words suddenly seemed urgent at the imposition of temporal and physical limits upon a night that had seemed endless, infinite just hours before. Six minutes. The poetry of familial chatter, easy and unbroken, effortless and minor. Three minutes. How did we get here? I’m thankful for you all. Two minutes. The train is approaching. This night is almost over. I’m going back to San Francisco. One minute. 

Good night. 

this is not fine

I say how are you, you say I am fine, and then we talk about something easier to talk about than how you are, which is not fine, because I’m fine means I don’t want to talk or I don’t know how, but I’m not fine, no one is ever fine. Fine is what you pay when your library book is overdue, fine is that china sitting in your dusty old cabinet, but fine is not your feeling, fine is not your state of being, you are not doing fine.  Fine is numb, fine is confused, fine is peaceful, fine is frustrated. Fine is a leaky sadness that drips like an IV into the back of your throat, fine is the well of anger you cannot draw out, fine is the dissonance between what your head knows and what your heart wants, fine is the thumbtack of guilt that is lodged in your ribcage, fine is the stifling tension of clinging onto what you can’t let go, fine is the cold spell of disappointment in misplaced affections, unrequited loves, fine is swallowing an orchard of tragedies, swollen like grapefruits, fine is the over and over again, the sweet terror of compulsive relief. There are so many ways to tell me who you are and how your spirit moves, but fine is not one of them. You are not fine.