Featured

Control

Someday I’ll write an honest story. An honest sentence. An honest word. Someday.

Sometimes driving I close my eyes. Speeding along the highway I pinch them shut and see how high I can count: one Mississippi… two Mississippi… three Mississippi… Sometimes I get to five. I’m always aiming for 10, but my fear invariably overwhelms me and my eyes snap open before I reach it. Maybe my car is a little out of its lane, but usually no. Usually I would have been safe for a few seconds more. Usually I would have lived.

I close my eyes and try again.

Reckless. Stupid. Crazy. I know. But I need it. I need it to remind myself. Because I want something different. I want control. I want to see the world, to know what’s coming, to understand it and be able to maneuver around the dangerous parts. I want to know everything speeding at me, to avoid the crash, to never be surprised, overwhelmed, heartbroken. I want my open eyes to be enough to live a life without hurt.

But it’s not. Open or closed eyes, I am going die. As fast as I may drive, it drives faster. It is coming for me, and that truth is one I’m scared of. I do my best not to be, but how do you hold out a hurricane? It is coming, and what it means I don’t know. I only know it comes bent on consumption.

So sometimes I close my eyes. Not to forget or to hide, but to make ready. Does it seem crazy, my closing? It is foolish and reckless with no possible gain. I know. I can agree with that. But it also may be my first honest word.

I love life. That is my honest sentence. I love the look and feel and sway of it, the way it kisses me awake in the mornings and slams me down some evenings. I love how the day brightens for me, how words like “precipice” roll off my tongue. There is so much amazingness, and its beauty overwhelms me.

But life is not within my control. It spins around me, a cyclone I somehow exist within. I am both part of it and at the same time separate, an inhabitant of it more than its owner. Life will never be mine to keep.

And neither is yours. Neither is anyone’s. With our eyes open we may become convinced otherwise, we may think we can wrestle some version of control, but that is the real crazy. We can’t steer. We can’t. Crazy thinking is we are in control. We can only watch the hurricane, our eyes our front porch.

I am crazy, and I am not crazy. I am only saying out loud what life whispers every day. Life is the crazy one. I am not its outlier. I am in its heart. As are all of us. This madness is all of us. You think yourself safe? Life will kill us all. Do your best to control what you will, but eventually you will see too. We will all see. We have no control.

It is terrifying, overwhelming, and freeing. There is an openness in closing our eyes and letting go of control. It carries a freedom: The freedom to be, the freedom to live, the freedom to love openly, the freedom to exist with our whole hearts. I close my eyes to embrace that vision. I close my eyes to remind myself, to see beauty, to let go of any demands and instead catch a glimpse of what surrounds me. Flying along through the madness I can see how little I need for my heart to feel joy. Suddenly perfection is everywhere, in you and in me. It needs no push, no refinement, no outside markers. It fills the room, spills into the hallway. It is overwhelming. It becomes the hurricane.

That is what I want. I do not want to control. I want to accept. I want to live. I want to walk alongside. I want to love, and to be loved, without conformity or comfort. I want to live in the wind.

I love you, and in loving you I want to control you. My eyes are open, and I want to see you, to know you, to know you will accept me and never be mad at me and never leave me. Most importantly that. I want to be loved like you want to be loved and I want to be free from hurt like you want to be free from hurt. I want. I want. I want.

But at night on the road I close my eyes. And I remember.

I do not want to control you. I only want to see you, to bear witness to who you are, to feel the pulse of your heart and the rise of your breath. To learn about you without the push or pull of my own interest. I want you to love me and only me and never anything else, but more importantly I want to not care about any of that. I want to watch you unfold, to forget your past and the future and see who you are, to be let into the guesthouse of your heart, to stand at the foot of your spinning life, to lie next to you in the whirlwind of time. No steering. No control.

For that version of love I need to be reckless. I need to fly down dark alleys and make it to 10, to 100, to 1,000. I need to let the winds come full force as I stand naked in the rain, feel the waves and blown sand rake my body. I need to let life overwhelm me and drown in its blackness. I need to let it all come, even hurt and death, and lie in peace. Let the silence slide over me. I need to lose. I need to forget. I need to fall.

And it is so hard for me. It scares me so much. I want control. I want to never hurt, never be alone, never feel anguish or loss again.

So I close my eyes. I do it to let go of fear. I do it to recover myself, to reignite my spirit, to remind me that hurt and loneliness and anguish are just more sand, more waves. If I love you out of fear I love no part of you, not even the idea of you. I love the idea that someone might see me, accept me, nothing more. You are an apparition, a placeholder. That is the place where the crazy lives.

So I close my eyes. I let go, and in letting go I learn to love fully. I learn to seek and explore without fear, to question what makes your heart shine rather than question your motives for shining. There is a recklessness to it, a foolishness. Discovering your heart and yet ignoring the urge to stay safe, rejecting the urge to control, is its own version of night-driving. It is another risk, one without gain. It is crazy, lost, bleeding. We all want to be loved. And we want that love to be steadfast, enduring.

Maybe letting go is the key. Maybe rejecting control allows two people to grow in time: If I accept you then I can watch you shift and change without it threatening me. If you can watch me shift and change too without it threatening you maybe we have a chance.

I cannot control these shifts; not in you, not even within myself. And with time yours may diverge from mine. I want to celebrate them as I celebrate you, because in truth they are you. Your growth is you. Your movement and momentary expression in the world is you. That spinning movement of self is the miracle we call life. Your body is just a vehicle, one you both live in and never own. I do not wish to own it, or you, only to honor.

But that is not our pattern. We so want others to “be themselves,” like they are some fixed thing. But they are not. You are not. You are more complex than that. How much have you changed in the last year? The last five? What are you if not those shifts?

To love you I must let you go. I must cede control. I must strive to see the person you are, not who you were or who I would like you to be. I must find your heart, your never settled, perfect, dancing heart. And if you are you you cannot be who I want you to be. Unless I only want you to be you, who you are. I cannot want to change that, even if loving you as you are means together we veer into oncoming traffic. So I forfeit control. I close my eyes. I let go of the wheel.

And perhaps I find a perfect story.

Love and Thanks

messages-image1395101098 I read a short story the other day, and in it the author did all the things I admire. Her writing was playful, light, a drift of thrushes flitting about a thicket. I was deeply taken with her.

My writing, by contrast, is more goose-like: heavy, waddling from here to there. Sometimes it flies, but it only takes flight through powerful strokes. And once airborne it soars; the light dance is not for me.

I wish it were. There is a pixie-ness in erratic movement, a detachment from worry and the future. My writing is too serious, too focused on getting a point across. Responsibility for understanding sits with me, the writer, rather than on you, the reader, and therefore every sentence is planned, deliberate.

But for a book on love that technique will never work. There words can’t fall like stones too heavy to lift again. I’d be lighting a tea candle with a flamethrower. Love deserves better treatment than that. It deserves starlings and pigeons, packs that move in unison though they have nowhere to go. That’s love. Or a version.

I know a girl who holds her heart like a grasshopper tucked in cupped hands and covered. She wants it to leap, but everywhere are frogs waiting so she keeps her hands closed.

Another woman’s beauty is her curse. She’s not sure if it’s her that men love or her container. They profess everything but whenever she speaks they go blank. Her words become an echo. Her physical beauty is only a reflection, that a woman so stunning will accept them is to say they are enough. It is the acceptance they care about. She is lost to them.

I married the same thing once, only it was smart that mattered rather than pretty. She was pretty, mind you, but it was the quick-talking brain I fell in love with. That is to say, if she was that smart and loved me then maybe I was that smart too. I couldn’t tell—I’d never been very good at looking at myself. But with her as my rearview I stared quite contentedly. It didn’t last long.

What is love? Is it a joke? A tease? Because it never seems to go as we’d like. I have an answer, one that leans on trademark and is likely deeply unsatisfying for many. But it was shown to me, so I must tell.

Love is the Force, the Matrix. It is everywhere. It binds the world together. It flows into people and pets and chairs. It moves inanimate objects and pulls apart windmills. It’s a fingerprint from god, and it’s on you.

I wish I could explain it more precisely, but there it is. Love is a hummingbird, not a goose. The goose we can predict. It takes to the sky in great heart-shaped flocks and soars south to north with seasonal efficiency. But love isn’t like that. Love is Canada, where the geese land, and the rain that slows their way. It is the hunter looking to fell them. It is the marshes where they take refuge. It is the bullet and the reed. It is all those things. But we keep looking for the goose alone.

If I love you I don’t care who you are. I look at you and I know. I look at you and see brilliance. I see you for who you are and love that thing. I love it unceasingly, without reciprocation. Love is in the viewing, the standing next to, the breathing in. It is in your scent, the brush of your eyelash, the movement of your throat as you swallow. I love madly because I must love. It has nothing to do with being loved back. Those two are not connected.

Love honors, but it does not keep. How hard to remember! But I do not honor your walk by demanding it parallel mine. I honor your walk by watching you take it, by being blown away by each stumbling step, by admiring your courage those times your heart calls you to walk alone and you heed it, cast me to dust. That tearing sound? It is me. Your walk may leave me bloody, but it amazes me just the same. Love cannot kill me because it is me. It never leaves. It flows in and out of things. Sometimes it flows into you and out of me. A river in springtime, sometimes swelled with snowmelt and rain, a river in fall, sometimes lean and rocky. All versions of love are as equal.

So where does my love live? Where can it reside if not in you, with you? Nowhere. Everywhere. In me. Because you are fleeting, and if I love you I want you to be. I want your transformation to end, for the you that is to be you always. But you are the hummingbird. Your dance I cannot understand. Your shimmer changes with every twitch. I can only watch. I can only follow you with my eyes, my hands, my body. You might linger for a time, but I can not pour myself into you. Such acts are temporary.

So where does my love live? It lives in me. It is me. It is my body and being. It is my every heartbeat and breath. That is where my love lives. I boil with it, and it overflows me. I see you and recognize another such creation, perfect and wild. But I cannot give you anything. I can only hold that love myself, let the wonder of you live in my eyes. I know that love boils in you too, that the grasshopper you carry is a feint, a distracting jellybean. Your love is not for you to give away; it radiates like a second sun. It gives no greater light for my proximity. Find a place to entrust your heart inside of you and let it power the shining. Your heart is everything—the goose and the hunter.

And what of the fear that they are here because of the container? I suffer that fear myself, but only when I am in search of a container too, when my motives are shallow too. My covered eyes allow the world to fool me. Because what is a container? If you love, you offer the world you. That is the gift. Your container is destined to die. I may love the look of you, but look with an eye for beauty and everyone is beautiful. Smart, funny, pretty, kind, everyone has pieces. The other day I drew a woman who had the most stunning lips. I wanted to kiss them, but that’s not what she was there for. All the beauty of the world sat right there beneath her nose: full, red, alive. The rest of her form, what does it matter? Where are your lips?

I can’t fully explain. Either you get this or you don’t. But if you don’t, please come back to me. Reread, looking for pigeons rather than eagles. Majesty cures for a while, but humility allows a glimpse of the world around us. I am not wise, I can barely explain. But the river in springtime flood can carry us away without explanation. Love is like that. Don’t worry about the words themselves. Trust the feeling. Wade in. Worry about nothing. Worry about not drowning. That would be scary.

Traveling.

I have lots of thoughts. They begin with this:

If that is where your heart is, go.
Be prepared to be lonely, hurt, scared, lost, overwhelmed. And go.
If you wander you are accepting instability. It will overwhelm you at times, and it will show you tremendous beauty.
It will remind you of the impermanence of things.
It will give you the space and the emptiness to recall all of your failures, all of your imperfections.
And in facing those you’ll find courage, remember your heart. And you’ll also drown.

It is worth it.
But the things you are seeking to escape will still be there when you return home.
Life is a balance of movement and stillness, and it is in the stillness that we recover our hearts.
But the movement is necessary. It uproots what is otherwise hidden.
So that in stillness you can consider how to move through it.

Your heart is amazing. You are looking for it, trying to learn how to remember yourself. I get that. My heart is the same. All hearts are the same. The base ingredient of this world is love. Beauty and love. But we forget. Sometimes we need to shake things up to remember.
But in truth they are there all along.
You are those things.
In movement and in stillness.
Yet it is so hard to remember.
If you need to go to remember, go.
If you feel going may offer something, go.
And when it is time for stillness again, you’ll know.

It’s already there in you. Perfect, beautiful, amazing. But sometimes we need to remind ourselves.
And sometimes we need to wander.
But there are 1,000 ways to wander.
Some mental, some physical, some emotional.
If you have been in one place for too long, perhaps geography is what needs to change.
But.
A shift in place will not fill that space.
It will distract you for a time, an elongated moment, and then the emptiness will come screaming back.
But wandering will give you fresh eyes to see the connections you already have, the community you left behind.
It will remind you of its richness.
That is its gift.
That is why I say “Be prepared to be lonely, hurt, scared, lost, overwhelmed.”
Leaving will allow you to see what you have with fresh eyes.
But what you feel is missing is not missing.
Nothing is missing. Nothing is ever missing.

You are in this moment now because you need to be. Nothing is missing, nothing is broken. Your heart is reminding you it is up to you to create the world you love, the one that feeds you. Your seeking is about something else, something more elemental.
Movement may be part of recognizing what that thing is.
It may be an important part.
But the struggles inside you are your heart, not your place in the world. The place you are in is exactly the place you are meant to be. It is in recognizing how to move from that place that we get lost.
And in thinking there is a right way to do it.
Go or stay, you are doing what you need to do.
And stripping your heart bare—that is the key. To everything. No matter what.

Do not seek to be happy.
Seek to experience life.
Seek moments like now, where you are wondering what to do.
Those are life’s experience.
They are worth holding onto, moving within, breathing in, swallowing until they drown you, sharing.
You are worthy of sharing. Of being reckless with your heart and your choices. In whatever way fits for you, feeds you.
Love cannot hurt you. It cannot bleed, maim or kill you. It only seems to when we look to bend it to our own purpose, when we seek to control it, to force it to feed only us.
Instead, let your love feed the world. Offer service and kindness to others. That is the key. It is what feeds our hearts.

I cannot do this, what I aspire to do.
So I keep practicing.
You understand. I know you do.
The world wants us to see love as a gift, not a cage, not a binding contract. And yet we fight against the world. So it keeps reminding us.

If I sleep with you I’m going to want to keep you.
And that is OK.
It is the place I am at.
This life is about learning to let go.
So I keep learning.
But I do not start from a place of fear.
I start from a place of recognizing and accepting myself.
And gently leaning into the struggle.
Without judgement for myself.
That is love: a practice ever evolving.
You will slip and fall.
Yet that is not failure.
That is THE POINT.
It is you, you being perfectly you. It is beautiful.

We are all searching for a place to be ourselves, fully ourselves.
Most love is a box.
You are worthy of more than a box. You are worthy of everything.
Can I offer that?
Can you?
No.
But that is what we are yearning to become, where we yearn to be, not some other place but in a space where both we and the world can be ourselves.
So we practice.
Practice however you have to.
Nothing is missing.
We are just confused about love, the world and everything in it.
When someone else hurts you, remember they are confused.
When you fuck up, remember you are confused.
Never understand anything.
Just wonder.
I wonder about you.
It feels good to be wondered about. Amazing.
That is love.

Love everything.
Everyone.
Understand nothing.
Love the world. All of it.
Then you’ll see nothing is missing.
Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is to be a mess. To be confused. Lost. Drowning. Overwhelmed.
To let go of judgement. Of yourself and others.
When someone hurts you, you still love them. Love them fully. Openly. With everything. With your all.
Accept them as perfect, even when they are a mess.
The point isn’t to be happy. The point is to feel: sadness, hurt, loneliness, these are what you are searching for.

Confusing, but worth it.

#RoadLife

How do you let go of control?

How do I let time become an ocean, trust its buoyancy, its random eddies, breezes and currents? How do I swim with them rather than against?

On Friday I caught a plane out of Fort Lauderdale at 8 p.m. EST. I landed in San Fransisco at 11 p.m. PST with the salt of the Caribbean Ocean still in my hair. I grabbed my car, which a friend had just driven from San Diego to San Fransisco on her own adventure, and drove to another friend’s house who had sent me a note a month before after 10 years of no connection. Barely a few hours before I’d been on a diveboat with two other friends, one new-ish, one brand new, who welcomed me to join part of their roadtrip from Maine to Colorado by way of the Florida Keys. We rented a houseboat, spent mornings practicing yoga on the roof deck, paddled kayaks and paddleboards into the gulf, shared conversations and splendid silence.

Life did that. Life brings magic. It brings connection and friendship and splendid moments. It brings awe and mystery and graceful elegance. This week I got to see it, first in the burning oranges of a sunset, then in the wings of a ray, and again in the smile of old friends.

People ask me about being on the road. “You’re living the dream,” they tell me. That happens a lot.

Whose dream? I often wonder. There is an aloofness, a loneliness to endless travel. There is tremendous emptiness, moments of overwhelming quiet no amount of Facebooking, texting, singing to the radio or laughter can quench. Over miles of stretching blacktop, or waiting at airport gates, or sick in a hostel surrounded by no one you know, the inherent solitude of life comes calling. It’s possible to drown it for a time, maybe with a random conversation, a run, someone else’s warm body for a night, but it comes back. It keeps coming back.

It comes back at home too, but at home it’s possible to pretend you’re building something, that all your running in place is working towards an end, that the empty quiet is outside, has not found its way into your heart.

On the road, however, it’s different. On the road you are bouncing, caught looking for flashes of beauty and moments of connection. There is no keeping out the quiet. It floods in, and you accept the drift of time, the buoyancy of life, trust it to carry you.

And in letting go, the world reveals itself. It reveals both the loneliness, the sadness, and the light. Everything exists in one place. It is overwhelming, painful even. Unsteady. Long.

“Living the dream,” they tell me. I’m not so sure. Their idealized vision of a life unsteady forgets the costs of carefree. It is a practice of accepting constant discomfort, accepting always not knowing. Just like their lives, mine is beset by fears, only different fears. Will the money run out? Will the next opportunity show up? Will I find a place to sleep tonight? If it is all a dream, it is a confused mess of one.

But it is one brightly punctuated, one so full overfull of emotion at times I wish life was a ride I could pause. Nights can be dark and overwhelming, but they can also be stunning, technicolor, so bright it is nearly unbearable. The richness I find over and over again, the connections I make, the fascinating complexity of the world I am lucky enough to bare witness, these are the gifts of living unstrapped, allowing the ocean of the world to carry you, allowing time to sway as it will. Seldom is this existence dull. Life on the road is raw to the quick, and every step is an experience. The only choice is to let go, to release myself into the stream and see where it takes me. Anything else would leave me drowned.

And maybe that is the dream—a life of feeling, even if the feelings run dark at times and always out of control—for all those people leading some different version. I don’t know. I look at my friends homes and growing families and I see the dream there too. A piece of it, at least, an experience punctuated by beauty. The differences between us, between their lives and mine, are few, maybe none. An illusion, perhaps, a dream. The one we are all living.

A Collaborative Dance

Nothing gets accomplished alone.

We are a country of rugged individualists with celebrity dreams. We dream of making it big, succeeding, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, a metaphor that indicates we can create our own salvation.

But nothing happens alone.

I have amazing friends. Some are climbers, adventurers, others photographers, videographers, others writers, teachers, environmentalists, businesspeople. Massage therapists and waitresses. Nurses, engineers and retirees. Together they make my world.

I have big ideas. All the time. Once I came up with writing a book. It died on the vine. Once I tried to fly to Haiti after the earthquake. That didn’t go anywhere either. Another time I came up with another book idea. It ended the same place as the first. All of these were ideas I took on alone.

Once I had an idea to go to Iraq and work as an embedded journalist. This idea I shared with a friend who also happened to be the news director at New Hampshire Public Radio. “Alright,” he said, “let’s make it happen.”

Three months later I was flying into Baghdad, utterly terrified about what I’d gotten myself into.

But I wasn’t alone. That made all the difference. Three weeks later I flew home having done what I set out to do. Nothing else compares to that.

A few weeks ago I came up with an idea. It’s an idea bigger than I am, one that has to do with writing, reporting, adventure, the environment, the future of the Earth and the human race. It’s an idea I don’t want to let go of, one I don’t want to die like so many ideas before it. It’s an idea I need help with. So while it was still fresh, instead of rushing headlong into it I did something simple: I picked up the phone. I called my friends.

My friends can do anything. I watched them climb mountains, write books, build rock gyms, start photography businesses, start nonprofits, reinvent themselves and then reinvent themselves again. I’ve watched them change the world. I’m lucky to have such friends.

But I never understood how they did it. I always looked at my efforts, looked at my ideas, how quickly they withered, and wondered what they knew that I didn’t, what they had that I lacked.

Then one of them asked for my help. She had an idea, a project bigger than herself, something involving climbing and mountains and scientists and conservation and a documentary and college kids, something overwhelming and beautiful. She asked for my help, and then she asked for help from everyone who would listen. And the project grew. It built speed, became something real, took off. There were setbacks, but she kept pushing. It was a beautiful, inspiring dance, one I was honored to have a hand in. It was so big, so complex and powerful and challenging and different, I couldn’t understand how she kept it all going. But then I realized: she asked for help.

Want to do something amazing? Don’t do it alone. Share your idea. Trust it with people who inspire you, with people whose vision matches yours. Let them water it alongside you. Loosen control. Let it see where it takes you. You will not be disappointed.

I am making phone calls now. And my friends, those people capable of doing anything, are answering. It’s almost as inspiring as my idea. Maybe more so.

The Road, and Everything Else

There’s something about the road.

It doesn’t matter how many times people write about it, how many times people say it, the truth of it always resonates: There is something about the road. Maybe it’s the unsteadiness of it, the unpredictability. It cracks people open, leaves them vulnerable, open to spark and tangents. It pulls us in unforeseen directions, leaves us with fresh perceptions. There is something beautiful about it. Something primal.

I was outside just after dusk last night. 100 steps from the house was silent, dark. Then a flash of green, and another. Slowly they multiplied, a sea of beacons blinking around me: fireflies. The first of the season? I couldn’t tell. I hadn’t noticed them before last night, but was that because they weren’t there, or because I’d been distracted? I don’t know. But seeing them was like magic.

How much to we forget to see? How often do we look at the world as mundane because we have grown accustomed? And once we’ve stopped seeing, how do was see again?

That is the gift of the road. It brings us back to our senses, to our sense of wonder. The things that we grow accustomed to at home become new again in our absence. The fireflies regain their spark.

I hit the road in a few days. A week of freediving in the Florida Keys, then out to California for some friends, diving and climbing, then up the Pacific Coast to surf, climb and explore the Pacific Northwest. From there I catch a flight to Belize where I’m working with high school students on a service-learning project for three weeks, then diving for a week. Then it’s back to the PNW, and who knows, maybe more climbing, maybe Canada, maybe drive east.

But as much power as the road has for revealing the richness of our existence, I’m still caught among a mixture or emotions. It’s strange to be preparing to leave again. Today marks two weeks since I got home, barely time to settle after two months of climbing, diving, surfing and friends, adventures that began on one coast and ended on the other. It’s been two weeks of family, friends, oceans, rivers and lakes, cliffs and mountains, coffees and laughter. There are so many things that make life rich, and adventure is but one of them.

Adventure, however, is the one I know well. My heart can throw itself into lost wandering at a moment’s notice, barely a change of clothes in hand. When I was 15 I started carrying a toothbrush, a towel and a fresh pair of underwear with me everywhere I went. I wanted to be ready to wander, always. It’s a habit I’ve only built on over the last two decades.

But there is another version of adventure, a kind that doesn’t require plane tickets and mountains; an emotional kind, a personal kind. It is standing in front of a roomful of people and speaking honestly about something that scares you. It is taking the stage to sing, talking to a friend and admitting you were wrong. Saying “I don’t know” in a roomful of colleagues. It is revealing your heart, your beautiful raw self, with openness and vulnerability, being your true you in a crowd. Those are a different kind of adventure, the kind that build build bonds not just to ourselves or to one another, but to society, to community. They are nature, but not as we normally seek it. They are us in our natural state, us as us.

Those, I find, are rarer on the road. They may be there with one person, or with a few, but to throw ourselves into the depths of our community and be our richest, rawest selves, we need society. We need a critical mass of humanity. We need room to be among the members of our tribe.

That is not the adventure I’m known for. That is the adventure of musicians, artists, dancers, not those we typically call “adventurers.” But it is in the same spirit, lives within the same reckless heart, that someone takes to the stage for the first time to act in a play. To climb a mountain is no more daunting. This is the full spectrum of “adventure.”

My life of late has been full of the mountain kind. It has been full of rope and remote places, plane tickets and passports, oceans and overhangs. Some call it “Living the dream,” but lost along the Pacific Coast Highway is only one kind of adventure, and many versions call. The Dream includes every version of risk.

The Road. That is one thing, and I will soon be back on it. It is a course I can easily take—my bags are still always packed. But the other version of recklessness—the vulnerable human kind—calls too. And to access it takes more than plane tickets, more than wandering. It takes people. It takes community. It takes a crowded room. It takes a willingness to cut through the mundane, to reveal things normally kept hidden. It takes a bold heart, one poised for emotional destruction, not just physical.

And just like wandering the remote enclaves of nature, there is tremendous beauty hidden on these adventures, moments full of richness and light. But they are seen together, shared, not lived alone.

There is something alluring about that. As alluring as the road.

For B, in Gratitude

“Life and love are confusing things, and too many nights are spent sleepless.”

A friend sent a note the other day, and those were my words typed in solidarity with someone trying to figure it out. It had a certain ring to it, flowed in a writerly way I strive for all in all my work.

And it’s true: whether in life or in love I have no idea what I’m doing, and many nights are spent tossing. If the world overwhelms you, if it seems too bright or too fast or too complicated, I get it. I too am doing my best to hold on.

I read a book the other day by Oliver Sacks, now-deceased professor, writer and neurologist. The book was called Gratitude. It’s small, took barely an hour, four essays Sacks wrote in his final years. It chronicles turning 80, the revelation he has cancer, and his final thoughts before his death at 82. It’s short enough to read in an hour. And like any book addressing death directly, it’s powerful. A Washington Post reviewer called it Sacks’ posthumous gift.

Perhaps anything that grows so directly from death is bound to be moving, bound to contain poignant reminders our days are few, that life will not continue forever. A year ago my step-grandmother died, and the piece I wrote about her was similarly affecting.

But death is not only sad; it also a doorway, a secret entrance, the key to god and the universe and life and love and everything. It is both. It is everything. It is all of it at the same time.

How? Simple: You are already dead, so there is nothing to fear. Ever. Nothing.

How easily we forget. How easily we get distracted by work and bills and advertisements and immediate needs. But we will die. We will not escape. We are there already. Time has bent and death is upon us and every thought we have from now until it arrives is but a dream, the briefest hallucination.

Death will come, and when it does it will come fast, fully, completely. And in that moment it will feel like your life was a blink, a sneeze, a flurry of activity ended premature. There is no way to sidestep, no way to avoid that which everyone before has succumbed, which everyone we know will succumb, that which we ourselves will eventually also submit.

But there is something comforting in that. You will die, and I will die, and no matter how many people surround us in the end it will inevitably be alone. But it is a doorway everyone passes through. We all walk together to that aloneness, united in something we cannot but do by ourselves.

So we know it is coming. There is no stopping it. And we know it will happen alone. But in that truth we are united and no one is ever alone. So let go of the fear. To fear death is to expend energy that makes no change. Instead we can welcome it, look with openness and wonder as it approaches, greet its coming with a willingness to see what adventure it holds, the final and most brilliant version following a life of mini-adventures.

That switch, that walk through death’s doorway with openness and grace, makes all the difference. It transforms everything. Death is coming, but exorcised from fear it loses control of us. It becomes just another step, another dance we are lucky enough to experience. And in becoming that it allows us to let go of ourselves. Death’s inevitability becomes just one more step, one more mystery to uncover, one we can do with grace.

Because mysteries are the most amazing parts of life. Falling in love is the mystery of meeting someone new, watching the story of them unfold before you. Life is but the unfolding of your own mystery. Death is just another version, a new step in a dance we are privileged to practice. Like life, like love, it is an experience to cherish, something to be lived fully, felt fully.

And stripped of fear, stripped of the need to control every step, those moments before death arrives become brighter, richer. There is no reason for fear, no reason for regret, no reason to look back and say “I wish.” Because stripped of fear, stripped of angst and worry, we live fully. Love falls deeply, wildly, uncontrollably. Life runs reckless, perfect and free. Every moment becomes a chance to fill the space we are offered with beauty, grace, wild blasts of perfection, moments that breathe and then die just like we do. We do not look to hold onto them after they are over, because they, just like us, are temporary. And in the briefest spark burns the full essence of life.

Life, love, sleepless nights and the promise of an adventure far greater than anything our memories hold—it is all before us, within us, surrounding us completely. We cannot get away from it, the raw beauty of a world stripped clear of pretense and fear. It whispers in the wind, hides the air we breathe, courses alongside the blood in our veins. It is all that we are.

But we forget. We wander and stray. We fall into ourselves, trapped in a conversation so easily distracted.

But not to worry, Death will greet us all someday. You will be reminded. And when that time comes, I will be next to you. As will everyone.

On Science

Yesterday I woke up to a bear in the yard.

He wasn’t doing anything really, just milling about. I watched him through the window, basked in orange sunlight as he snooped. Then I packed my things to go swimming.

I’m not much of a swimmer. I did a lap across the lake, pausing in the middle to lie on my back, float and stare upwards. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears as I let my wetsuit suspend me, limbs dangling in the water. When I exhaled I sunk. When I inhaled I rose. I watched clouds track overhead, felt the ripples as they brushed my face, then closed my eyes, floating. I stayed like that, motionless, just breathing, for what felt like hours. It may have only been a minute; I lost track of time. Then I turned into the water and aimed for the near shore.

Driving home my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered anyway. “Hi, this is Erik.”

On the other end was Gene Likens, the scientist who 50 years ago discovered acid rain. An ecologist and former Dartmouth College professor, his most recognized work took place at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, a site an hour drive from where I spent my swim. Likens co-wrote a book on the forest, and I thought it might be worthy of a story. We spent 20 minutes talking. He described the surprise of discovering acid rain.

“Nobody knew there was a problem,” he said, but “the very first sample of rain we collected was very acidic,” up to 100 times the normal levels.

What got them to look at rainwater? Curiosity.

“It was purely serendipity,” he said. “So much of science is this way.”

“We didn’t set out to discover acid rain,” he said. “It was there and we ran with it.”

A quote has sat on my desktop for several years:

“The beauty of science is not in the answers it provides, but in the act of questioning. And each question leads to more questions. There are no answers, only infinite questions.”

It’s not a quote from some book or from anybody famous. It’s mine, just some musings I scribbled. I jotted it down one day when it popped into my head, something I didn’t want to forget, even though I’ve now forgotten the context it came from.

But yesterday I heard echoes of it in Likens. He was not studying stream water to prove some point. He was there to learn, driven by curiosity. It was a search of wonder, devoid of ego, even though it eventually made a name for Likens.

Science is built on such wonder. It is the act of questioning, of exploration and answers so tenuous they are subject to constant revision. But through the soft passage of time, through the constant brushstrokes of curiosity, a truth emerges. What emerges is the heart, the soul of our world, something foundational. But no part is so sacred it cannot be discarded, slain. Everything is open to more questions. There is something beautiful in that.

I can’t help but wonder if religion is born from the same roots, if at one point humans looked at the majesty of the universe and couldn’t help but exclaim, “Who could have made such a beautiful thing?!” and the answer they came up with was God.

That question is a perfect one. Who could have made such a beautiful thing? What could have led to this, to this world and this life? They echo the question scientists ask today. Look into the heart of the world. Whether your launch point is science or religion it is impossible not to be overcome by wonder, by beauty and grace and the perfect harmony of things larger than ourselves. How does the Earth spin around the Sun? How did life come into being? How did so much order grow out of seemingly infinite chaos?

Those questions were with me too. They were in the bear sitting outside the window yesterday morning, in the beat of my heart in my head, in the caress of the water and the color of the sky. They are questions I asked the lake lying on prone in the water, buoyed up by a force I will never fully understand, asked the sky gazing at clouds dotting a blue so striking it felt like more water. Neither revealed their secrets, but they shared gifts just the same.

Wonder. Beauty. Grace. These are both the heart of science and the heart of religion. Indeed, they are perhaps the heart of everything. The magic of creation is captured in a piece of music, a Van Gogh painting, in Shakespeare and Hemingway. In the movie that speaks to our hearts, in the play that touches our souls, in the book that we come back to and back to. Science, religion, music, art—it is all the same. It is all one thing, different versions of the same dance.

And that dance can take place in the world, with the Earth as your partner: the perfect wave to the surfer, the long winding trail to the runner, the sweep of immaculate stone to the climber. The friend that stands opposite you in dark times. The lover who shares your bed. Creations all. Art, science, religion, beauty all. Questions, infinite questions, too big to ever contain in something so small as an answer, all.

I wrote the piece on Likens today. It will never do justice to his story. But his answers are not the point. He is a scientist; the point is always the questions.

One Page, Typewritten

June, 1947. Page, 24, sits at the bar in the Sheraton Plaza Hotel in Daytona Beach, Fla. It’s hot, Florida in summer hot. She sips a drink alone.
A man walks in. A sport coat and pressed shirt drape over his lanky frame. His nose is sharp, eyes the color of coffee. As he crosses the room he seems to point to the floor — his eyes, his nose, his head, his chest. He served in the war. It’s that walk, she can tell. He comes toward her.
“Hi,” he says. “May I sit down?”
“Yes, of course,” Page replies.
He pulls open the chair and sits. “Thank you.”
The past can be hard to picture, it leaves only shadows. The impression remaining is cobbled together like scenes from old movies — the characters are real, but the settings are wooden, the dialogue imagined, almost fiction.
But Page is real. And so was he.
They talk. He’s witty, makes her laugh. She orders a second drink. He finishes his first. Late afternoon slips to evening, but the dark Florida June is still stifling. Soon he has to leave.
“I’m giving a talk,” he says. “It’ll be an hour. Will you wait?”
She smiles. “Wait for what?”
“I’d like to have dinner with you,” he says, standing.
“An hour?” she says. “Yes, I’ll wait.”
When he returns they leave together, walk out of the bar, out of the hotel and into a restaurant. They keep talking — him telling stories and her laughing. When they finish dinner they go to another bar, then a third. It’s after midnight when they walk back to the Sheraton Plaza.
“Thank you,” Page says, leaning against the door to her room. “I had a wonderful night.”
“Me too,” the man says.
She steps inside, closing the door behind her as he walks away.
The next morning early there is a knock. Page pulls on her robe. “Yes?”
“I wanted to thank you again,” the man says. She opens the door and he hands her his card. His fingers trail across hers as she takes it. “It was the perfect night.”
He smiles. “Write me,” he says, and then turns.
She looks at the card: J.D. Salinger, writer.
1947, four years before “The Catcher in the Rye.” Page is now 92. Her birthday just passed. She lives in South Carolina, still drives, still lives in her home. She is my grandmother.
I knew none of the story when I visited last fall. She’d fallen, broken her pelvis and was in a rehab center awaiting surgery. I drove down to offer help. Aside from the break she was healthy and strong, “This place is full of old people,” she told me. “Not like me. I’m old, but these people have no idea what day it is.”
But not her. Ninety-two or not, she remembers.
“You’re a writer, so you might appreciate this,” she said, and she told me the story: the bar, how he came in then left then came back. Dinner. The next morning. All of it.
“Go in my desk,” she said. “In the back there’s an envelope. Look inside.”
“Write me,” he said. And she did. And he wrote back.
The envelope was yellow and stuffed with clippings. The return address — P.O. Box 32, Windsor, VT 05089 — lacks a name; the postmark read May 23, 1976, 29 years after the hotel.
“Dear Page B.,” the letter begins, typed in the irregular stroke of a typewriter. “Mainly, I suppose, because of the kind of work I’ve got myself into, my memory seems to be almost extinct. Or so cluttered and cross-cluttered that I can get at things only at their convenience, not mine. Not that it doesn’t all come back if someone very kindly presents me with an artifact or two — the seating plan of some old dining room, say, or a sketch of the way deck chairs were placed around the swimming pool, or sometimes just a plain wet black bathing suit does the trick.”
But even faded, the memory survived: “I was back at that Daytona hotel a couple of winters ago, with my children, but the place had turned seedy and the weather was cold, and we cleared out in a hurry.”
One page only, signed “JDS.” He referred to her children (“I’m aware of what goes into having just two. The algebra of seven is too much for me.”) and her separation, indications of past correspondence. Her words, however, are silent, only echoed on the page of a man who splashed letters like paint.
“You do sound intact, but very much, though, and I’m glad. For what very little it must be worth, I send you all these inanities with warm apologies.”
He is dead now. She is 92. But the letter remains. Thirty-nine years later, 68 years later, the past is still cluttered and cross-cluttered. Memories fade, then disappear, and from the rearview it sounds almost like fiction.
Almost.

This story appeared in The Conway Daily Sun in July of 2015.

The Wind and the Sea

The wind asks the sea

“Will you join me?”

with gentle kisses that form ripples

on her surface.

She demurs

thinks herself trapped

caught among her currents.

But he persists

“I am here,” he whispers

and kisses her again.

She rises to meet him

in great rolling swells

swayed

along his course east.

Her back arches in every wave

aching to be one

as they rush the shore.

There she breaks

shattered foam against the rocks

and he soars over woods of pine

and oak.

ErikEisele.com

Category: Poetry