There was something in the pattern of clouds and sky yesterday that I wanted to quilt. I wanted to somehow find that texture in layers of cotton and thin batting, using Japanese thread, and somehow as I was swimming under the sky in water almost too cold to bear, I was taking the pattern into my own breathing, my own pulse.
I was myself yet I wasn’t. I was looking at the pattern but also I knew it was beyond me. It was almost too cold. A loon feeding under the cedars near the shore suddenly saw me and took off low over the water.
I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.
Today, I looked for that sky but it was gone. Another blue, lighter, and 4 female mergansers arrived just after I did, settling on a log by where I turn to swim in the other direction. When I’d finished, John said, They came just after you began your swim and they left just as you came out of the water. We saw them in the distance, swimming away.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.
Like this.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stay in the water as one month becomes another and I know I’ll feel as though I’ve lost something — being part of the layers of sky and lake and air, small allegiances of ducks, the sound of kingfishers. Like this. Almost exactly like this.
Note: the lines are Rumi’s, translated by Coleman Barks.
