these are letters from the road (desert road trip #3)

12/25/2013 -- C.C.

I wish you were here with me, Caroline! I have learned so much this year. I have accelerated and then slowed down. I have failed and I have been made aware of my imperfections--I am not always reliable or kind or compassionate or selfless--and yet--all is well here, and right now--I have seen and known God more than I ever have, and that has given me the capacity to love better, despite all of my flaws. Everything seems to be more delightful, while mattering less, if that makes sense at all. There is more of a levity to living, even though I can also feel the gravity of each moment. I can’t recount to you all that has happened since we last saw each other, but I can tell you where I am right now.


12/25/2013 -- A.B.
We've been listening to Bob Dylan quite a bit on the road (actually, we asked friends to make playlists for us and each has been remarkable, but no one has put Dylan on their playlists!) -- such great traveling music, with a sense of awareness of everything around him and in the air, and yet he remains somewhat detached from it all. There's a wandering feeling to his music that you and I both know well, and then there's the storytelling, and the poetry, and the muttering, and the harmonica! It's been awhile since I listened to Bob, but every time Bob is something new! 

How are you? How is the city? I love living in cities--but I'm not sure if it's good for my soul--it feeds the worst parts of me, so I need to get away often--to make sure I'm caring about the things and people and matters I want to care about--and not get carried away with the material surfaces of the urban simulacrum--if I'm allowed to call it that.


12/26/2013 -- K.O.
When we entered the chapel, the service was solemn and small--and it all seemed really formal--and then the priest, Father William, blew his nose, and I almost burst out laughing. I think the funniest moments are flukes--when something almost too ordinary disturbs the peace or flow of things--little awkward charms, situational humor, you know. I think you would have laughed too! Because everything at the abbey is so much simpler--quieter and emptier--the funny, awkward moments are so much more pronounced. 


12/24/2013 -- J.R.
The desert is not so alluring or attractive at first glance--or comfortable, for that matter--but it is open and expansive, stark naked, so different from the city lives we're used to, where people scurry around, in close confines but so unaware of each other, unaware of so many sounds and places and faces that just fade into the background, become distracting noise--distraction from some other, seemingly more important focus, because we're always going somewhere and what's ahead seems so much more important than what's here right now. In the desert, your job is to notice, to be attentive. It is easier to listen to God, and when all else fades away, it's clear that we're here to love and be loved by God--it's so easy to lose sight of that sometimes.


12/24/2013 -- S.S.
Amidst this quiet, this empty space, this wide and free landscape, it seems that loving is all we were meant to do. The rest feels trivial you know? How we go about our ordinary lives as if we had to make them into something extraordinary, hurrying here and there but to what end?
...
Leaving most things behind, even for awhile, has given my head and my heart space to breathe. I feel relieved to feel, if even for a moment, unattached. And yet--here, this letter, a token of my attachments, a token of my love...our hearts and souls want freedom and also some kind of tethering. Blaise Pascal described men in three words: dependence, desire for independence, needs. Merry Christmas! I love you!

this is a sacred movement through space (desert road trip #2)

City driving makes me jittery and nervous, so I don’t do it very often. The pedestrians and bicyclists are chess pieces haphazardly played by some strange, illogical hand, bullets to dodge. So here in the city, I mostly walk or take the bus, or take BART, mainly to spare myself the stress and the near-convulsive panic I experience when I parallel-park, which I don’t do well in the first place and do even worse with angry drivers behind me glaring laser beams of fire into my car.

But I like sitting in cars, especially on a cold day with just enough sunlight for the car to trap, becoming its own little greenhouse. There’s something comforting about the protective walls of the car, how it separates you from everything outside of it, so that you’re in your own self-contained sphere, unbothered by anything else. Sometimes the car is most sacred when it doesn’t conform to its function, which is getting you from point A to point B. Sometimes you’re just trying to get it together at point A.

But on a road trip, the automobile itself is your prime destination, where you’ll spend more hours than all other stops combined. You might rest your head or fill up on food, but then you’re back on the road again, moving like a vagabond, living like a rolling stone, a wayward sojourner, briefly. A road trip plays out like the Canterbury Tales, in which the pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury contains the stories to be told, even though the stories are named for some end that is a mere abstraction while on the road.

Hours pass easily in the car if they’re not the hours leading up to something else, but rather, the hours that you keep and make something of. At the steering wheel, you stare ahead, the vast expanse awaiting, the open space above. You barrel towards the purple mountains in the distance that never seem to get closer or grow bigger. The Spartan trees, the dead trees, the lonely wind mills, acres of mysterious land, touched but untouched, cleared out but fallow, a purgatorio where the mind whirs and wanders.

On long stretches of empty asphalt, you’re focused enough to keep a sharp mind, but you haven’t given your mind away. There is room for daydreams. This is a meditation on the road, the path ahead of you focusing and re-focusing the squadron of voices in your mind, and you’ve got just enough breathing room to let a mellow, contemplative hum sail on through, like the Bateaux Mouches on the Seine, taking the same circular route, over and over again, with new and curious passengers every time.

My dear friend Asa biked through Europe the year after we graduated from college, and he wrote about what went through his mind on these long rides from Firenze to San Benedetto to Lago di Brescia, and he captures well the interplay of the conscious and the subconscious, the focus and the lack thereof. In a letter, he wrote:

"This isn't to say that you don't think about things, it's just that--well--there are long stretches where (I think) you don't. It's what you do tend to think about that's the truly strange part of the whole thing. When I say that one's mind is not one's own I mean to say that, while riding, the subconscious seems to take the wheel (err--handlebars) and kind of just float stuff around a bit. In some cases, this can be a good thing--I've remembered people and places I hadn't thought of in years on the bike--but in other instances, you get stuck on a bad topic, and there doesn't seem to be any real way (at least that I've discovered) of removing oneself from it. I spent an hour during a day's ride, right after a semi had nearly brushed me off of a particularly bad stretch of road, imagining what my head would look like crushed underneath the tires of this same truck. "Like I bloody watermelon," I thought."


***



Do you remember the first drive you took after a horrible breakup? Or the drive home from the airport after you said a long farewell? That space charged with all the particles of your emotions, the anger, the tragedy, the sadness, accelerating and halting in sync with the car. Whenever my mom gets angry, she clears her mind by going for a drive, detonating her feelings by physically moving through them, a smooth coast along asphalt sanding down the harsh edges of her skin.

I remember a Saturday afternoon in November. We were lying in a car with the seats pushed as far back as possible, backs folded down so we could recline comfortably. There was nothing to do and nowhere to be, so we just lay there, on a quiet suburban street, listening to folk music. The leaves were red, I remember, because when we were walking to the car we picked some off the ground and chose our favorite leaves. There wasn’t much to say, but it was thrilling to be with each other, so we just lay in the car, parallel bodies in space.

Months later, in that same car, we pulled over by the side of the highway, where Bohemian meets Bodega by golden fields of dry grass, and we argued blindly, teary-eyed, about petty things. Petty things that are worth arguing over because in romance, the stakes are great, and every little thing has some unbearable significance, some weighty fear attached to it. As we argued, every turn was hazardous, like city driving. But there was no running away because we were in this cramped little car with each other, with nowhere to go, and we had to stay and figure it out.

In the end, there’s always something waiting on the horizon. Thousands of miles later, when you arrive back where you started, you unpack the car that stoked hours of thought, sheltered so many strands of conversation. That tiny sacred space that moved you through so many landscapes, from the high desert to middle-of-nowhere Arizona, from the Sonoita Mountains to downtown Tucson. Through the redwood forests of California when the sun was setting and you saw only the two red rear-lights of the car ahead of you for miles of windy road, and it seemed like this ride was going to last forever. You fell asleep, and you awoke in awe to a new landscape, and you kept on moving. The car protected you, you felt safe for awhile, but in the end you arrived somewhere else, and you had no choice but to get out and join the crowds again, in the old rhythms of time that the road makes new.

From Rob Clayton's playlist: mercedes benz / thanks for nothing / shepherd's song / ragged wood

this is love stew

All the ways I’ve learned to love, or not love at all, have rested on the belief that my heart is fragile, like those delicate glass orbs, frosted with glitter, that we used to hang on our fake Christmas tree. At some point, I realized that those ornaments were as likely to break if I clutched them too tightly, as they were if I let them slip out of my hands, dispersed by gravity into smithereens.

In middle school, when all the girls went around in a circle saying which boy they had a crush on (boys came and went like fashion trends) and who we needed to make code names for, and who was the best handball player, I kept silent. “Who’s your crush, Natalie?” “No one!” I would retort, quickly and snappily. “You’re lying! Tell us who,” they’d whine back. “I swear, no one! I just don’t like anyone right now,” I’d say, exasperated, arms crossed, defending myself against what seemed like accusations.

During my freshman year in high school, one afternoon in November--after school had let out, I had stuck around for something or another, somewhere on campus, and then around 5 or so, went upstairs to my locker in Dobbins Hall to pack up my bag before leaving campus. I climbed the two flights of stairs, and when I reached the top, was intercepted by a skinny boy with floppy black hair that draped like a silk curtain across his forehead, covering most of the top half of his face. He was walking away from a group of friends--and towards me--but I didn’t know him, and had never met him.

He walked right up to me.

“Hey,” he said. “Will you go to winter ball with me?”

“What?” I said, averting my eyes. His question shocked me. The casual way he asked a question of such gravity--to a thirteen year old, no less--left me breathless and panicked. I didn’t think I heard the question correctly.

“Will you go to winter ball with me?”

I paused, now feeling dizzy, a sense of vertigo displacing me in both time and space.

“What?” I said again--hearing the same question I had heard before.

He repeated it a third time, “Will you go to winter ball with me?”

I was silent, lock-jawed, spooked by this Jack-in-the-Box that had so abruptly appeared in my otherwise safe and normal adolescent existence.

I stared back at him.

“Why?” I spat out, the only word I could utter--and with that one mysterious word, turned around and ran down the stairs as quickly as I could, out of the building, face flushed hot red, heart galloping, me, panicking. Might as well have been fleeing from a burning building.

I’ve always thought that question “why?” was illogical and cruel, sickly irreverent. From the moment after that word left my mouth to this day ten years later, I am embarrassed by that handicapped response, so immature, so inane, so graceless. I never talked to that boy again, though I admired him from afar after the fact--I was interested in why he was interested in me.

Despite its lack of grace, the question “why”--a question I still ask of the feelings in me that feel like afflictions and not births--wholly embodied my reaction to--even the possibility of--romantic affection, which was: how could you be interested in me? How could you love me? And anything that involves you-liking-me-and-maybe-me-liking-you was tremendous and terrifying, like walking out onto the high perch of a diving board, imagining how much belly flopping would hurt and how much water would go up my nose and into my ears, and how doom was so plainly inevitable. I always expected the worst. Anything with a high chance of loss wasn’t worth much of my time--or heart--at all.

At best, this was all one big terrible joke, a ploy to humiliate me. I could make a conspiracy theory of anyone's affection for me.

I’m sure there were many psychoanalytical reasons why I felt this way, but in the landscape of my consciousness, surely the movies I watched played a part. The Nora Ephron movies (You’ve Got Mail; Sleepless in Seattle; When Harry Met Sally) and a whole slew of Julia Roberts chick flicks (Notting Hill, Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride) were highlights in my dad’s VHS collections, so my sister and I devoured them too, with seriousness, with a weighty sense that these narratives were the way things were supposed to be. They were some of the first romantic narratives we encountered.

This is what they laid out: A man meets not just a woman but singularly, the woman, and the romantic entanglement relentlessly works itself out because it is destined to be so. No matter the obstacle, his love is reserved only for her. That became my belief--that my love was reserved, and should be preserved ruthlessly, sealed off to anyone who inquired about its existence, kept in the cellar, salted and cured, hoarded for winters to come. I would not release my love so easily, lest it be snatched from me. I believed that once I let it go, my love would float away like Moses down the Nile River.

The first safeguard: never admit attraction at all. Admission was weakness. Giving away even a piece of myself was to make myself vulnerable; it was to skin myself while still alive. I would never whisper of even a fondness for any boy I knew, and whatever delights welled up in me, I hid away, pounded down into myself. I was determined to contain it all in the stuff sack of my being, this compression bag that was as terrified of what it contained as it was of letting anything out.

This was an existence of silent yearning--and confusion--in which I superimposed the narratives I encountered--in books, movies, music, etc.--onto my own desires, everything a future story that could only be contained in my head at present. I’d not let my heart make a single sound, though its inclinations towards love and being loved never submitted to death for lack of entertainment.

In the first few months of college, I met Shannon, who would become my best friend. Shannon loved ceaselessly, shamelessly, and hung her loves like little charms around her neck, even if they sometimes scraped at her skin or made too many jangling sounds. She had a high school love who tore at her heart for many years after they had broken up. The memory of him conjured easy tears, and his face was embedded in so many songs and even in the faces of strangers she had never met, whose one word or gesture or piece of clothing could transfigure into his. She didn’t know why she couldn’t let him go (we never really do know though, do we?). She was still netted up by the idea of him. It was never as easy as burning the physical mementos of him, which she did occasionally, ceremonially. Those mementos all turned out to be mere effigies, never the real things at all.

I saw all the wispy little loves she breathed in, how she could continually wring her heart out, though it never dried up. She never had any less love to give, even though, by admission or by thought, she could give so much of it away.

During our third year of college, she fell in love with Eric, who worked at a cozy little bread shop on Brattle Street, a bare-boned, cramped space with wooden interiors, always smelling of yeast and sawdust. She visited the bread shop whenever she could--multiple times each week--always ordering the same thing (the densest, most fragrant vanilla bean-flecked loaf and an over-priced slow-drip coffee). She always asked for the heel of the loaf--the end-piece, she called it--which had more crusted surface area than any other piece. He began giving those to her diligently, automatically, whenever she came in, with her mane of tangly blonde hair. She was once mistaken for Ke$ha.

When the price of the loaf rose by 25 cents, Shannon was indignant and said that she might boycott the place entirely--but I knew that this declaration was an impossibility. It was a failed attempt at detachment.

Unlike me, Shannon wore her emotions the way she did her make-up: heavily, brusquely, sometimes recklessly. Out of self-proclaimed necessity. It was easy to see her embarrassment or pain, which always seemed to stun her, crumple her, and those were the times she ran away--when she could not bear to let her pain be known--because she couldn’t stifle them, so she just left, often frantically. She wound her loves so tightly around her heart, and even when the spool rolled and spoiled, unraveling ceaselessly, she never cut the thread, even if she threatened to do so.

Toward the end of that third year, we knew we were leaving campus soon, so Shannon decided to give Eric a note, declaring her love in a charming and off-handed way. The note was ripped around the edges to look like a casual remark, unmeditated. She walked in, ordered her loaf and coffee, and as he reached over the counter to hand her the coffee, she passed him the note saying, “This is for you.”

She cried that night, telling me how embarrassed she was to have flaunted her silly affection the way you might feed ducks at a pond, scattering bread for the pecking flock. That the affection was unrequited did not bother her--it likely deepened the pining in fact. Though she regretted her gesture, I admired her--and still do--for her easy admissions of love and delight, little bubbling geysers sporadically spewing forth; her proclamations of being enchanted by someone’s beauty, which instilled in her a sense of God-inspired awe, the way beautiful things point us back to some divine mystery we cannot fully comprehend. We are strengthened by the ethereal whispers of gestures, faces, words, moments, and rhythms that etch themselves onto our swelling hearts--the ones no one else notices--and those fluttering wings of beauty we meet--if we care to meet them at all--are made more glorious by our attachments, migrating here, there, everywhere.

A year ago, Shannon called me from Dar es Salaam, where she was wandering and sojourning. She called to ask for dinner ideas. A man she loved was coming to dinner, and she wanted to please him, feed him, as we do to those ones we love. “A chickpea stew,” I suggested, “with couscous.” Warm, comforting, drawn out. A stew: love stirred in a pot, tenderly slowly, onions caramelizing, chickpeas soaking up all the liquid, roots and fibers softening, breaking down. She could not say she loved him, but both she and I knew, that she slipped her heart into that stew, knowing words, that night, just wouldn’t do.

this is why you should laugh at yourself

"No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stop in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of snow coming down. The fall of roofs and high buildings is treated with some gravity. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified."

-G.K. Chesterton

I screamed, and then went completely silent.

Charley later told me that that the silence gave it away. Had I made a sound, the scream would have most likely been a joke, followed by laughter. But the scream itself was the eruption, or interruption, and nothing came after it.

In one swift second, my foot had gotten stuck between the car tire and the sidewalk: a total fluke of a moment, in which two forces pulled in separate directions, unknowingly. Luke was still operating a moving vehicle; I, unaware, tried to get out of the car. As I stepped out, my foot wedged itself, literally, between a rock and a hard place, he backed his car closer to the sidewalk, and the back tire dug further into my foot, squeezing it into a chokehold.

I screamed.

Charley ran around to the back of the car as I stared down at my foot, bewildered, shell-shocked, teeth sinking into lip, trying to swallow my tears, fearing that if I let out even one drop, my entire face would shatter, a bed sheet of ice floating precariously above black water.

I couldn't feel my foot anymore--how amazing our bodies are at blocking our suffering--and yet, the sudden, unexpected bolt of pain left me mute, dumb, and frozen.

Kneeling on the sidewalk, Charley gently took off my shoe, an Adidas high top with gold zippers, now scuffed. Luke hovered above, looking distressed, afraid, as anyone would be, of having injured a friend. Later, he recounted how terrified he was as Charley untied the shoe, hoping for something less than a post-traumatic monstrosity, a mere remnant of a foot, dangling phalanges.

Luckily, my foot was intact: a puffy and swollen heel and a tender ankle, but it still looked like a foot. It could have been a lot worse.

Luke apologized profusely, surely as shell-shocked as me, if not more--not by the bodily pain of physical injury, but by the affliction of guilt, which is a horrible injury one thrusts upon himself, like an explosive and grating act of self-mutilation. Like wishing that by rubbing salt into our own wounds, we’d heal the open wounds of those around us.

First stunned and helpless, then fumbling for words, Luke turned to the surest salve that he had, which was humor. I don't remember the jokes that he tried to crack. After all, it's not the jokes that matter, these incoherent words that tumbled out of our mouths as we were frantic, panicked, and unsettled. The jokes probably weren't even that funny, but we all tried to contort our mouths into smiles and laugh anyway, because it was the only relief that we could find at the moment.

I said I was okay, that I wanted to head into the party. I didn't want to sit here and try to figure out what to do with my ailing self. In pain, I wanted distraction. I wanted to move on immediately, escape the situation. This place we had descended into—this space of post-traumatic shock—felt like limbo.

Luke and Charley wouldn't let me walk, so they carried me to the party, my arms and legs split between the two of them like a great, big chair, hoisted in the air. I could only laugh at the absurdity of the situation, that on the evening of my twenty-third birthday, I was being paraded around like a helpless babe through these dark and quiet streets. Just ten minutes ago, we were driving up Divisadero listening to Zach Condon's travelling voice, which vibrated through the car, dark, somber, wistful, yearning and sweet--and now, now the vibrations had changed, and we were trying to make sense of this minor mishap. It was all going to be okay.

When we arrived at our friends' house for her holiday party, I stumbled in, trying to smile, trying to be okay. And yet, my body gave itself away.

"Natalie!" my friend Eileen exclaimed, greeting me by the door.

"H-h-hey," I stuttered back, my eyes glassy, glazed over. I had no words.

"Have you been drinking?" she asked, which I hadn't. I never do.

"No," I shot back, but that's all I could say, and when I couldn't manage another word, Eileen pulled me outside, and then into a bedroom, where I lay for the rest of the night, icing my foot, leg propped up on a pillow. I cried, convulsing, not out of sadness, not even out of pain, but because it felt most natural, as if the tears could excavate the shock and the absurdity of everything that had happened.

By the end of the night, Luke and Charley had found me and spent the rest of the evening by my side, trying to make me laugh, slinging jokes meekly at one another, trying to find a way to soothe the sores of this strange night.

"I'm sorry I messed you up on your birthday," Luke said to me at one point.

“Don’t feel bad,” I told him. “I’ll remember this birthday forever. And I’m pretty sure this is a bonding moment.”

Sometimes, trying to find the comedy in a mishap feels a little bit like picking up marbles with oil-slicked fingers, or trying to rescue trinkets and tchotchkes from swirling flames. Sometimes, it's a compulsion, like the mischief of scaring a flock of pigeons, or touching all the dusty surfaces of antique porcelains in a museum.

I remember one time in high school, I saw a classmate frantically weaving in and out of the hallway crowd trying to get to his next class, and as he was running, a classroom door abruptly opened and slammed him squarely in the face, banging his forehead so hard it rung, so hard that his glasses fell off. I saw this and burst out in cackling laughter, roaring at the top of my lungs, as if this were all slapstick comedy, which it may as well have been. Moments later, I was appalled at my own reaction, this sadist in me suddenly making itself known. Whether it was his haplessness or my helplessness, my first instinct was to laugh.

Mark Twain said, “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow.” Comedy arises out of our awareness that something is not as it should be. The injustice and sadness and brokenness around us demands that we respond with an awareness of those very incongruities, and that is what humor boils down to: interruptions, parodies, non-sequiturs, exaggerations, sarcasm—these are all ways of dealing with the incongruities in our lives. William Hazlitt says that we are the only creatures that can sense a real difference between the way things are and the way things should be, and that ability is both a blessing and a curse.

In Shakespearean tragedies, there is always a character whose role is to inject comic relief into the most somber scenes, when the rest of the characters are on the brink of tragedy. That is to say, levity can coexist with gravity—maybe it is even the way out of tragedy, a means of dealing, healing, and moving forward. Sometimes, in the wake of pain, our humor is morbid and inappropriate; sometimes it is a mere diversion; other times, it allows us to make hard-won connections with other people, or rationalize an unanticipated event, or find reason for a missed expectation, or vilify a scapegoat. Sometimes, it merely relieves tension; sometimes it eases the soul. It recognizes absurdity.

If we’re talking about tragedy, what happened on Sunday night was ultimately trivial. My foot is fine. In fact, what seemed like a small misfortune wasn’t really one after all. On the night of my twenty-third birthday, I lay in bed, surrounded by funny and loving friends, who tended to me by singing, telling jokes, and bandaging my foot. They missed out on a party to stay by my side. I was privy to the kind of categorical compassion, strength, and kindness that glamour and comfort often preclude. In a moment of collective weakness—and yes, I think all of us struggled a little—our skins were peeled back, and a new dimension of our selves became known to one another. It was that part of ourselves that we normally hide: the self in pain, the self in discomfort, anxiety, worry, or stress; the self we call ugly; the self we’re afraid of; the disoriented self; the confused self. We hope that when these parts of us creep out—because they were always there anyway—that our friends will still see us as whole, even though we’re fragmented, and yes, we really are.

“You saw me cry tonight,” I told Luke, after we left the party. “And that means we’re really friends now.”

I heard someone once say, that the courage to laugh is absolutely necessary to the pursuit of liberty—and oh, how difficult it can be, to laugh. To not take myself—or my misery—too seriously, for my own sake, mostly, if not for the sake of those around me. I’m writing this as a homily to myself: If I had to dig my own grave, I'd choose to laugh while digging, rather than cry, because either way, I’m heading in the same direction—only, I’d rather spend more of my life laughing than crying. Sometimes, making fun of my misery makes it just a little more bearable than wallowing in it.

And sometimes, when the people you love come along for the ride, and their laughter and light help you see outside yourself, farther beyond than you could on your own, you’ll find that what you thought was a tragedy may not have been so tragic after all.

this is an optical discovery of humanity

Burning Man happened months ago, but I have still yet to make sense of it all. The ten or so days bleed together into one amorphous space of time, like a muddle of watercolors that have yet to dry.

But certain events bob up to the surface of my consciousness, events that won't let themselves be forgotten.

One afternoon in the middle of the week, my friend Kevin May, a poet and rapper also known as Phil Opsophical, gave a workshop at the central dome in our camp, Fractal Planet. His talk focused on building a new world, one rooted in compassion, community, vulnerability, and love rather than in fear, greed, and selfishness -- the base motives that cause much of the suffering in the world as we know it. His talk was inspirational and compelling not only because of the words and wisdom he imparted but because of his wide open heart; his rare gentle disposition that reminds me of Gandhi in its radical departure from the aggressive posture that our society seems to champion, even if in subversive ways.

But what I most remember about the talk was one exercise he made us do. I'm usually reluctant to do these kinds of participatory exercises because they feel forced and uncomfortable, and you can't take yourself too seriously, which I do, to a fault. I was sprawled on a dusty tarp, sombrero and Camelbak beside me, not wanting to move in this dry and languor-inducing heat, but because I knew Kevin personally, I felt obligated to participate. The spirit of Burning Man is also one that mysteriously induces both the boldness and silliness that seems impossible to muster in the structures of ordinary life.

Kevin told us to find a stranger in the room and sit across from them, face-to-face. It's that familiar moment that we all dread, when you're at some meet-and-greet and scramble to occupy yourself with someone else's attention, so unconsciously fearful of being that one single soul who will surely drown in momentary loneliness. In those moments, your eyes become instinctive predators, moving swiftly to lock down another's, and it was to my God-given relief that my pair did seek and find, a wiry young man with thin hairy legs and big floppy sandals. He had dark brown buzzed hair and wore a white t-shirt, which appealed to me as did all rare signs of ordinary comfort at Burning Man. His name was Eric, which I saw first scrawled in sharpie on his water bottle but pretended I didn't see when we introduced ourselves to each other. He was from Oakland, and he had come to Burning Man alone.

After a few minutes of perfunctory introductions, Kevin told us that for the next five minutes, we would be doing something so ordinary yet rare--and difficult, and daunting. We would be staring into each other's eyes. It's interesting  that we say "staring into" and not "staring at." "Staring at," or "making eye contact" are sterile phrases, but "staring into" implies seeing beyond the surface, as if opening or discovering, or looking deeper, looking past. How often do we stare into someone's eyes? How often do we lock ourselves into a gaze with another, a gaze with a stranger? Even conversations with our friends do not promise prolonged eye contact. It's easier to look away or dart glances around the room, scope out what's going in every crevice outside of the actual person in front of you. On the street, mistaken eye contact with a stranger is a burn--at least it is for me. It terrifies and embarrasses me when my gaze scrapes the surface of a stranger's eyes. So how could I do this for five minutes?

When the clock started, our eyes met; they met despite the distance of space. Mine blinked furiously trying to make sense of this strange act I was participating in, this counter-act to avoidance, this self-coercion of staying, of not running away. Though I was sitting still, surely my eyes projected the bewilderment that churned inside of me, this unnatural act! I searched for a way to put myself at ease; if only I could abstract this man into a surface, a two-dimensional veneer of this greater, more terrifying thing in front of me: this person, this soul, this body connected to me by such remarkably little will. A tiny moment in a vast expanse of time, yet this gaze required consciousness and unwavering persistence through immense discomfort.

Something happened though, and I'm not quite sure how to explain it. I don't know how the tension suddenly dissipated, how the fear mysteriously evaporated. How mere looking became actually seeing, how lovely and laughable it was that I could only think to myself that I was, in every cliched way, swimming in the blue pools of his eyes (such a remarkable moment, and so inadequately trite a description), which were not merely one shade of blue, but many pigments, with orange and amber stippling that glistened and changed the longer I stared back. Like some strange tidal wave suddenly brought on by mysterious lunar pulls, love for this man suddenly overwhelmed me; this irresistible love, like how could I not love this person whose eyes I am sinking deeper into? I knew nothing about this man; in fact, I was scared at even looking at him, and now this, this awe that sprang into me; this wisdom to know and love humanity if only I were willing; if only I acknowledged God's creation as one of His, incredibly made in His divine image.

We think we need to know to love, and yet the most divine, selfless love falls outside the realm of human ability. There are moments when broken spirit meets broken spirit, in conscious acknowledgment of the other, when we're not dodging the world and the people in it, when we let ourselves be fully in the world for a present moment, and we can finally see, like truly see, another human being for the first time. Like looking up in a darkened elevator and saying hello, how are you, I am not going to just be in this space with you pretending you're not there, I am going to be here with you because we're both human, and we're meant to connect with each other.