Note: this was posted 8 years ago. Today we are bringing in plants again, more of them, because there are now half a dozen bougainvilleas, the 3 epiphyllums have (somehow) become 5. Offspring of offspring of offspring.
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It’s autumn again, the year turning as the planet turns, as the ocean at Long Beach last week eased into shore and then retreated, the silver of it in morning light as lovely as anything I’ve ever seen.
I’ve been moving plants into the sun-room for winter. I always think this will take, oh, half an hour but of course the plants need to be pruned back, tidied, dead leaves shaken into a bucket. Some of them are the parents or offspring of things I’ve tended for more than 30 years. The jade plants, the scented geraniums, some succulents brought for me as Mother’s Day gifts at the local swap meet, a Meyer lemon I bought on a whim in 1987 and often have enough fruit from for marmalade. 3 huge epiphyllum cacti that bloom year round and draw the hummingbirds in summer when we hang them from the overhead beams of our deck pergola to shelter among the grape leaves and wisteria.
I came in to read Du Fu, his Autumn Meditations. Always the precise observation and always the sadness for friends gone, the summer only a memory, the sound of geese flying south.
Jade frost bites the maple trees and Wu Mountain and Wu Gorge breathe out dark fear
as river waves rise up to the sky and dark wind-clouds touch ground by a frontier fortress.
The chrysanthemums have twice bloomed tears of other days, When I moor my lonely boat my heart longs for my old garden.
The need for winter clothes hurries scissors and bamboo rulers. White Emperor City looms over the rushed sound of clothes beaten at dusk.
Yesterday I put my summer clothes away, lavender tucked into pockets. When John got up to make the fire and coffee, I heard him wonder aloud at the light over the patio, then his chuckle as he realized it was the wisteria leaves turned gold. It happened, as these things happen, as life happens, almost overnight. And every year we are startled by the unexpectedness of the usual. This morning, I thought, oh, I must ask my mother about something, and then realized, yikes, she’s dead. Has been for 8 years next month. But wasn’t only a year or two ago my parents joined us at Long Beach and sat on logs looking out to sea while our children turned cartwheels in the sand? One of the succulents I brought in was a Christmas cactus grown from a tiny slip from John’s mother. This year it’s loaded with buds.
As Du Fu noted, “Immortal companions share a boat, move on in the evening.” The plants come in and I find room for them under windows from a house built before the First World War, many of the panes still with their original wavery glass. That’s why my sight was blurry when I came downstairs. I’m sure of it.
Watching: Every morning, I watch the jays while I drink my coffee. They are endlessly entertaining. There’s a pecking order — the one with white eyebrows is top jay — and they are pretty ruthless in protecting their seeds from the other birds. Yesterday, on a whim, I put the Steller’s jay bud vase Angie gave me out on the wooden platform where I strew their seeds. I wanted to see how they’d respond. You can see for yourself! The two brave enough to even come near wouldn’t hop onto the feeder itself but looked nervously at the vase. The vase, with its little bouquet of marigolds, stared back.
Reading: Some weeks the library shelves don’t offer up much that I’m interested in reading. Is it my imagination or are there more dragons, women with straining bodices, smoke rising from burning castles on book covers than, say, five years ago? Or ten? But last week I found a small memoir, Anuradha Roy’s Called by the Hills: A Home in the Himalaya, which I loved reading over two nights, trying to ration the pages so I could stay within the narrative of finding a rundown cottage in Ranikhet, at the foot of the mountains, and building a life there, surrounded by gardens and dogs. A little gift to read as darkness settles and the nights cool. (And if you’re wondering if I mean Arundhati Roy and have misspelled her name, the answer is no, but I did once read a novel by Anuradha, thinking it was Arundhati. Two different writers, not related to one another…)
Enjoying: The moment where one bold jay made eye contact with the vase.
Listening: For geese heading south. I heard them last week but couldn’t locate their skein in the sky.
Wearing: Well, not quite yet, but last week I found a beautiful handknit Icelandic sweater at a consignment shop in Sechelt, creamy wool with a yoke patterned in deep rose and clear blue. I’ve knit one sweater in my life, using Icelandic Lopi yarn, watched over by the Graces of the seed store at the Butchart Gardens where I worked for 3 years as a university student — full time in summers and weekends in the off-season. The women were almost all knitters and they helped me figure out the simple instructions, putting their hands over mine as I did the difficult parts, and praising the final results in a way a YouTube would never rise to. That sweater was blue, the same blue in the yoke of this new one, and the same kind of yarn, or maybe even the same threads, allotted by the Fates all those years ago.
Remembering: The other night John was watching something on television downstairs and I was upstairs reading Called by the Hills when a song drifted up the staircase like a ghost from the past.
Don’t sing love songs; you’ll wake my mother She’s sleeping here, right by my side And in her right hand, a silver dagger She says that I can’t be your bride.
Like a ghost from the past, Joan Baez singing that song when I was in my late teens, her voice as high and pure as silver, dropping almost an octave for the second half of the third line, and everything in that drop: every sorrow of my teen years.
Go court another tender maiden And hope that she will be your wife For I’ve been warned and I’ve decided To sleep alone all of my life.
I was upstairs reading and I was listening and yes, I confess, I even wept.
Anticipating: Tomorrow will be our 47th wedding anniversary and I’ll make a special dinner of duck legs and polenta. Some years we’ve been here, some years away (two years ago in Paris; sixteen years ago in Vienna), but we always eat a celebratory meal and toast our time together.
Finishing: I’m not actually anywhere near finishing the current quilt-in-progress but I am already thinking ahead to the next one, something to showcase last year’s dye work.
This is usually the first jay to arrive in the morning, regular as proverbial clockwork. You could set your clock by the sound of its cry. This morning it yelled for breakfast and when I didn’t move quickly enough, it came to the screen door by the sliding doors to the western deck and clung to the top of the screen, tapping the glass with its beak. It’s the most aggressive of the jays who are habituated to this place. I know it by the white marks on its eyebrows, something I understand is more usual with interior populations of Steller’s jays. It’s only in the last year or two that we’ve noticed jays with the white markings. This one is top bird. It kicks the others out of the way and they only get to feed when it’s had its fill. Sometimes the air is blue with jays — the most I’ve counted at once is 7 and when they’re jostling for seeds, there’s a lot of vivid colour outside the window.
It’s the kind of clock I like best. Awake to the first light, the sound of cars off the Earls Cove ferry, the cat chirping for his breakfast. As much as I’d like to, I can’t live outside time. The world doesn’t allow that. Or maybe it does, but I haven’t figured it out yet. But to wake to the sound of a jay squawking and whistling (they didn’t used to whistle much but this guy with the white brows has a very pretty trill, used sparingly) or the soft progress of traffic from the first ferry of the morning or even (on occasion!) the sound of the coffee grinder if John is up first, and then the snap as he breaks cedar kindling to start the fire: these all enter my nervous system and ease me awake.
The day is conscious of itself, said Rumi, and I think the Steller’s jay with the white eyebrows might think that too. The day has begun. Come down, put out seed. Stand by the door and watch the tree fill with birds the colour you dream of in your deepest sleep. It’s exactly the clock you need.
Note: this was posted five years ago and refers to a surgery performed six years ago. I refer to an essay I’d written about our shared experience of that surgery — one enduring it, the other witnessing — and sewing my way through the process, and how I thought I might make a chapbook of the essay. I never did but the essay was included in Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee, published in 2023 by Arsenal Pulp Press.
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A year ago this hour I was in my rooms on the UBC campus, waiting to hear from the surgeon who’d just replaced both of my husband’s hips. One hip was wonky and then with the long wait time for orthopaedic surgery, his second hip also deteriorated. When he was called late last September and told to prepare for both the surgery and the recuperation afterwards, we were filled with optimism. We got the equipment we needed, arranged our house for safe recovery, and made sure the cupboards were full. (Wine rack too.)
A year ago this afternoon the surgeon called me to tell me how well the procedure had gone. I walked over to the UBC hospital, a walk I was to take many times over the next ten days, and went through the rigamarole (stopped to answer questions about my health, putting on a clean mask to replace the clean mask I was wearing, signed the form to indicate the time I was visiting, sterilized my hands in front of the security officer at the desk) to visit John in the recovery ward. He was groggy but excited. Two new hips! The prospect of a return to our long walks up the mountain. Easier travel once the pandemic situation allowed that again. He was a little concerned that he could feel and move his left foot but his right foot was still asleep. The recovery nurse assured him it would also wake up once the anaesthetic had worn off.
I remember walking back to my rooms and calling our children. I also wrote a group email to extended family and friends to share the good news. But by the next morning, a year tomorrow, the story had changed. The right foot was still asleep and that was because John had suffered a compression injury to his sciatic nerve and its branch, the peroneal nerve, affecting his ability to raise his right foot. The chance of this happening was one in a thousand. Over the next week, consulting with the excellent physiotherapists who helped him to move around with a walker, to use stairs, to seat himself and then rise from that position, and with the surgeon who visited several times, as well as with other orthopaedic surgeons who also came to talk to us, we learned that the prognosis was a bit uncertain. The nerves would have to regenerate and that happens slowly. It can take two years. If it happens at all, because there’s only a 50% chance that the nerves will in fact completely regenerate.
Whatever happens we will do our best. When it’s light out, the trees brilliant gold and deep orange, the house finches busy at the work of opening maple seeds, I am ready for anything. But when the weight settles, I pick up my quilt and stitch free-hand spirals into the sashing between the log-cabin blocks. The process of moving out from the centre and then letting the thread find its way out into the open space is calming, in the way I suspect meditation might be. My meditations are of the practical sort though; they always have been. Kneading dough, weeding, watering tomatoes and easing their unruly stems around strings leading them upwards. So I’ll stitch and hope that the threads will take me–us–in the direction we need to go now. Sure-footed or not.
The following week was strange. I was alone (because I’d taken advice to keep myself and John as safe as possible from infections, including Covid of course), walking back and forth to the hospital with a flask of Camino hot chocolate for John (because honestly the food was quite awful and he needed something warm and rich), news from home, and well, just to be company for him in his room overlooking trees.
Back in my rooms, I was working on two quilts. One of them, in the photograph above, had a complicated pattern of spirals in its sashing; I’d sit by a big window and sew. And think. I had a lot of thinking to do. About whether we were ready, about how to get us home, about the winter ahead. Now that it’s a year later and we got through that winter with all its equipment and further medical dramas (because only a few days after we’d returned home, we had to go down to the Sechelt hospital where John was admitted for an issue related to the surgery but also complicated, needing many tests and drug trials) and physiotherapy sessions, acupressure sessions, etc., I am reading a long essay I wrote during and after the winter. I wanted to record what was a life-altering event in our particular lives and I wanted to find the lessons in it. Because there were lessons, ones I might have anticipated and ones I didn’t. I’m thinking of making the essay into a little book, like the book I made of my essay, “Museum of the Multitude Village”.
The quilts were finished and went to their new homes — Anik’s house in Dordrecht, the Netherlands; and Cristen’s house in Edmonton. A year later, John’s foot has come a long way in its own recovery, although he will probably always have a slightly idiosyncratic gait. Think of Inspector Morse, if you are a fan of that television series. (In real life, John Thaw had a condition called drop foot, which is essentially what John has now.) Our long walks up the mountain aren’t quite what they were. Rough ground presents difficulties so we try to find places to walk where the terrain is even. But I have to say that otherwise, things go on as they always did. We swim — daily in summer, three times a week after the end of September. We built a greenhouse last spring. Over the past couple of weeks, John split and stacked three and half cords of firewood. Every few days he goes down our long driveway with a rake and a pick to level out the rough patch at the turn up the hill.
When I remember the week after the surgery, I remember the swelling, the bruising, the uncertainty. But also a kind of quiet beauty in the days. Leaves were turning and falling. There were finches in the trees. In the night I had a small lamp by my bed and I read Anne Boyer’s The Undying, finding in its dark record of Boyer’s harrowing experience of breast cancer a coded message that went right to my heart. You must pay attention, you must care from the bottom of your frightened heart. There is something to be learned from this. Find out, tell what it is.
The bruising is phenomenal. Your flanks, both of them, are deep blue and purple, streaked with red; they’re swollen, the swelling extending down your legs to your feet.
The trees are turning, the birds so lively in their branches, and even the rain against the window reminds me of time spinning from my spools of thread, drops finding a trail over the silver glass.
To take a set of objects and actions from one system and reclassify these as elements in another system is like fortune-telling.
I should take a photograph, I said, after we’d begun to eat our Thanksgiving dinner. It followed a day of sunlight, a brief swim in cold water, some log-splitting, some talk by the fire. I almost didn’t make a special dinner. We were in Gatineau last weekend and had a few wonderful meals with our family there and a friend is coming next week (I think?) so we will celebrate nearly 50 years of friendship then as well. But then I thought we shouldn’t let the day pass without note.
Middle English thanken, from Old English þancian, þoncian “give thanks; to recompense, to reward,” from Proto-Germanic *thankōjanan (source also of Old Saxon thancon, Old Norse þakka, Danish takke, Old Frisian thankia, Old High German danchon, Middle Dutch, Dutch, German danken “to thank”), from *thankoz “thought; gratitude” (from PIE root *tong- “to think, feel”).
It is related phonetically to think as song is to sing; for sense evolution, compare Old High German minna “loving memory,” originally “memory.” Also compare related Old English noun þanc, þonc, originally “thought,” but also “good thoughts, gratitude.”
There are many things to be thankful for, though the world burns and tornadoes rage and crazy men act out their most violent impulses. I am thankful. I am healthy, I have a wonderful family, I have love in my life, I have a pile of books by my bed so that I can read myself to sleep each night, I have a handful of dear and treasured friends. When I look out the windows of my house, a house I helped to build, I see trees I’ve known for 47 years, a mountain that is my weatherglass, birds who come for breakfast each morning, the occasional elk herd passing through, bears who are sometimes a nuisance but always beautiful. Inside, the scent of cedar and alder burning in the woodstove. A basket with a folded quilt-in-progress to occupy my hands and thinking. An archive of my own books.
So I made a meal for the two of us to share. Prime rib, smashed potatoes like the ones we loved in Porto last November (the young man who served us told us his mother’s method), brussel sprouts roasted with tiny cubes of double-smoked bacon, lemon zest, and lemon balsamic vinegar, squash roasted with maple syrup and ras el hanout, a few Yorkshire puddings, just because, the salad we call Oaxacan because we first had this version at Cafe Boulenc (sort of panzanella, with toasted sourdough cubes, tomatoes, cucumbers, thin slices of red onion, sliced green olives, lots of parsley and basil), and for dessert, baked pears with caramel sauce. You might see that there are two bottles of wine on the table. John loves an occasional glass of red, especially with beef; and in these later years, my system prefers white. His is something ordinary, that was already open. Mine is a Mâconnais chardonnay, uncorked for the occasion! And the glasses? The Waterford Clannad that John gave me for my 50th birthday, more than 20 years ago, still intact.
There are many things to be thankful for, though days pass when I don’t remember to acknowledge them. Sometimes looking at the etymology of a word makes me realize how much I don’t know, forget, or fail to measure up to. My first impulse was to let the day go by. This morning, putting away the beautiful platters and bowls, the shining Waterford glasses, I’m glad we sat at our table as the sun went down and gave thanks, a good and useful word. “It is related phonetically to think as song is to sing.” Though the world burns, though the crazy men rage.
It’s cool this morning, a fire burning in the woodstove, though I hope to swim once the mist has lifted. A sign of fall? 6 jays were waiting for seed on the railings beyond the sliding doors. Usually there are 2, or 3. I recognize those ones — one is large and aggressive, one has some white on its eyebrows and a bit of white under its chin (if a jay can be said to have a chin), and the third is a bit more timid than the others. But the gang this morning seemed interchangeable. If I don’t bring seed to them right away, they’ve learned to follow me around the house by appearing at windows where I can be found on the other side. Their favourite seems to be the window over the kitchen sink. They tap on it with their beaks. A couple know about my study and come to the chairs brought under cover for winter just by the window beyond my desk. They don’t tap so much as dance. I’m reminded of Louise Erdrich’s beautiful book about motherhood, The Blue Jay’s Dance, with its description of their courtship rituals. In late winter, our Steller’s jays are more attentive to one another, grooming each other, and I’ve always loved their tenderness. It’s not in evidence now, with the large one eating its fill and rushing at the others who try to take their share of seeds. But what can we know of them and their private affections? Their wildness is not ours, even if we think we might share something in the moment a jay peers into a window and taps at it with its strong beak.
So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? –Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance
By the fire, drinking my second cup of coffee, I looked through photos on my phone, deciding which to keep and which to discard. And it seemed so difficult to believe that every morning in June I could go out and cut roses to put in all the jugs. Moss roses, old sweet noisettes, sprays of unnamed apricot climbers. I’d go out in a rush to put on a sprinkler and stop to cut an armload of roses. The kitchen would fill with their sweetness. And later the sweet peas, the lilies, the clear blue agapanthus. For our Thanksgiving table, there are still some late roses to cut — Lady of Shalott, Mme Alfred Carriére.
In Gatineau last weekend, I paused for moment by a tiny painting I bought at the Kosiv market in western Ukraine in 2019. A man had small stall arranged with a few dozen oil paintings and when Angie and I arranged to buy a few — I was thinking of Christmas gifts for Forrest and Brendan and their families — he was so delighted to know they were going to Canada. I think I paid $10 each for the ones I chose. This one, though painted in spring, was a house I’m certain we passed on our way up the mountain to our hotel.
As my grandfather’s country moves into another season of war, I think of the the kindness of those we met daily in Ukraine, I think of the peace of that house, and I wish I’d bought every painting on display that day. I wish I’d never said no to a glass of horilka (given the number offered, I felt I had to decline some of them!), I wish I’d stayed longer, spent more time with the relatives who found me at the hotel on the shoulder of mountain you can see in this painting, and I wish that the worst humans didn’t have the most power in this world. It’s cool this morning, a fire burning in the woodstove, though I hope to swim once the mist has lifted. How many days do any of us have left to do the things that call us to attention? The jays squabble on the railings, hoping for more seeds, and any minute now the bold one will find my in my study, thinking a thousand thoughts that don’t seem to be connected, but are part of something I’m trying to parse. How roses can sustain us for seasons beyond their flowering, the memory of a small house under flowering cherry and pear trees (though I saw it in September) can shape the untidy dreams of hope, and the jays in their unruly constancy require generosity, and even love.
The ground I tend sustains me in early summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I’ll hoe for the rest of the year. –Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance
It is solved by swimming. (I’m lucky to have two children who know Latin and can help me tweak a familiar phrase to my own purposes.) It is solved by going down to the lake on an October afternoon and just walking into the water until there’s nothing left to do but glide forward. The awkwardness of the aging body, the little pain near the left knee, the shoulders stiff from a long flight in an economy seat, and then lugging a suitcase through an airport, a train, a bus, and up the flights of stairs onto ferry’s passenger deck. Then back down, along the ramp, and to the parking lot where the car waits.
It is solved. Or something is solved. The knot of thinking — ahh, windmilling the arms as I backstroked the length of the shore, but further out, in deep water; the knot easing out into something usable, long strands of sinew, to thread through a needle and sew into layers of cloth.
Something is solved. Or at least recognized as a possible direction: choosing geometric signs that carry meaning for me and finding a way to follow them. A meander, a spiral, a small roof. Swimming yesterday, I was thinking about a way to gather together ideas I have about form and function, about language, about a line that might carry music or the sound of the wind, the faint echo of starlight on a still night when you stand outside in nothing but a light cotton nightdress and listen. Something scrambles in the eaves nearby. Something else is also thinking.
The swimming is best in cold water. Best when the sky is blue over you like an open book. Best when a tiny fish jumps near your face. When the mergansers come to sit on a log and mutter amongst themselves. Yesterday the sand was warm when I came out of the water and I stood for a few minutes, wrapped in a big pink towel printed with flamingos.
After the airport, after the Canada Line to Georgia Street, and after the 257 Express to Horseshoe Bay, it felt like we were actually on our way home. We’d enjoyed five nights in Gatineau, spending time with our family there, helping a bit with putting the garden to bed, watching one boy’s diving class (the other boy’s swim team practices curtailed because of a shoulder injury), eating delicious meals, walking a trail right in the middle of the fall colour, we’d enjoyed all that, but somehow the quiet seats we found at the front of our ferry, with the Bowen Island ferry just to the port side, a seal mid-Howe Sound, those felt familiar.
Cities are a rare pleasure for us. This morning I am looking out at the woods, some mist over Sakinaw Lake, little splashes of gold where the big-leaf maples are turning, hearing the Steller’s jays yelling for their seeds (I heard blue jays in Quebec), and feeling the cat’s body winding around my feet as I sit at my desk. But yes, cities and their pleasures: crossing the bridges from Gatineau to Ottawa, seeing the library of Parliament’s elegant shape above the river, or the War Museum on LeBreton Flats or the National Gallery’s glass pyramids (I’d hoped to go on Monday to see Sylvia Safdie’s TERRA but discovered the gallery was closed that day), and yesterday morning, driving to the airport with my grandsons commenting on things we passed, which in their observations were mostly electoral signs, because, like their dad, they are passionate about history and politics and the discussion in the warm car was mostly about the election results from the previous day.
But ferries bring us home and that crossing is a time between. I mostly grew up on Vancouver Island so this has always been true. I remember 48 years ago this fall, sitting in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, reading Malcolm Lowry’s October Ferry to Gabriola, a brilliant and flawed novel, and feeling both homesickness and anticipation, because I was on the first leg of a long trip home — first across the Irish Sea (by ferry), then by train to London where I spent a week mostly making notes about the island I’d lived on off the west coast of Ireland, wanting to get everything down before I forgot even a moment of that otherworldly time, then a flight back to Vancouver, and a ferry home to Victoria. I’d been in a place about as far from a city as one could be and I remember reading the passage in which the protagonist, Ethan Llewelyn, remembers a childhood gift:
To be sure he had not been bidden so far afield as had his father, who’d spent the last year of peace before the First World War as a legal adviser on international cotton law in Czarist Russia, whence he brought back to his young son in Wales, or so he announced, lifting it whole out of a mysterious deep-Christmas-smelling wooden box, a beautiful toy model of Moscow; a city of tiny magical gold domes, pumpkin- or Christmas-bell-shaped, sparkling with Christmas tinsel-scented snow, bright as new silver half-crowns, and of minuscule Byzantine chimes; and at whose miniature frozen street corners waited minute sleighs, in which Ethan had imagined years later lilliputian Tchitchikovs brooding, or corners where lurked snow-bound Raskolnikovs, their hands stayed from murder evermore: much later still he was to become unsure whether the city, sprouting with snow-freaked onions after all, was intended to be Moscow or St. Petersburg, for part of it seemed in memory built on little piles in the water…
I remember putting the book aside and watching lovers walking, ducks in the lake, the memorial garden to WB Yeats with its wide-armed sculpture by Henry Moore, and the melancholy leaves falling everywhere. It was everything I felt made visible.
And the little ferry to Bowen Island, white in blue water, under blue mountains, a wake of ripples behind it, was everything I felt too. That arrivals and departures are long, beginning and ending with water.
I was in the ancient history section and noticed the books inscribed with an owner’s name and on the other side of the room, Forrest was looking through the collectible books and he noted the same name. Then he found Mineral Deposits of the Canadian Shield, authored by E. L. Bruce, the very man whose Virgil I was buying, and whose Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way I had picked up and then decided against. (I have a copy at home. I also have the Virgil but in a different translation.) We spent time wondering about Dr. Bruce, as one does, or at least as a historian does. Mineral Deposits was inscribed to the geologist’s wife in 1933. A story there, how the books came to be in a school gym book sale in Rockcliffe Park, and we talked about it at length.
And how lucky, A. found a biography of Robert Laird Borden, whose name he’d been dreamily chanting for days.
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.
