The Great Escape

Steve McQueen doesn't live here. Then again, neither do I. But it's my great escape. My head-heart-soul are kicked back with coffee, firewood, a notebook and pen, and Jorie Graham's "Place," even if my body hasn't figured out how to join them yet.

I'm generally lit up by the Christmas spirit, but this year, I've felt more like escaping. Wind, rain and sleet the day after were a treat for words, ideas and naps. And for building Legos if you
live in our house and attend elementary school.

My mind drifts between snow, cabins, frozen ponds and polar icebreakers. There's wanderlust in my legs to get out, to go somewhere. But Lyme Disease landed this year and has limited my time on foot and has me wondering how to cope, how to get back, how to get "it" back. I don't know my body and what it's capable of the way I have known it. What I'm left with is restless leg syndrome of the mind.

My mind seeks both stillness and adventure. I have a sense that both body and mind need to stretch to activate the soul.

The cold is setting in. I get the hibernating animals: I want to do the same, but not sleep, but go inward. I'm some place between, like a waiting room (cue the Fugazi song). Except for that song, I hate waiting rooms.

I want to simplify, Thoreau style; I want to meditate like Thomas Merton. I'm affected by the spaces around me, which is part of the reason for wanting to escape.

I want to tie disparate threads together--Jorie Graham, Merton and Gaston Bachelard's "Poetics of Space," with the backdrop of a winter cabin as the existential shoelaces to lace up the trail shoes.

Aahh, it's the work.

* Photo from Cabin Porn, my new favorite Tumblr site.

A$$-pocket notebook as a Cloud Atlas

1. "I asked, how is knowledge found?" "You must learn how to read, little sister."

2. "We are only what we know, and I wished to be much more than I was, sorely."

3. "What was knowledge for, I would ask myself, if I could not use it to better my existence?"

I carry around a small, black notebook in my back pocket. Or, as we've said here, quoting R.L. Burnside, my "ass pocket." My notebook and a pen are more likely than my wallet to be found on me in a search.

The ass-pocket notebook is scrawled through with quotes, inspirations, existential questions, landmarks, grocery lists, reading and music recommendations, notes jotted from meetings. When I flip back through it, I can remember where I was or what I was thinking when I read the pages forward. If I can read my writing.

We've talked about Junot Diaz here already. The other mind-blowing contemporary novelist who has been rewiring my brain is David Mitchell, as I am on the home stretch of his "Cloud Atlas." There is no spoiler here, I'm not talking plot twists or reviewing the book. But as I got to the section called, "An Orison of Sonmi-451," I found myself filling my ass-pocket notebook with passages like the three above.

Sonmi as a character is coming to things like knowledge, reading, nature and the world outside for the first time, and as such appreciates things in a way that most of us have long forgotten or taken for granted. That echoes one of my favorite concepts/lenses for looking at life and the world, "Beginner's Mind."

I've pondered the title, "Cloud Atlas" a bit, which I more than dig. The fruitless, frustrating mess of trying to map the moving, shifting, swirling clouds. Why would anyone put themselves through that? But then, you have the mornings or evenings when the clouds are painted with sun, and even though you know there can be no holding it together, no way to make it stay; you know that by the time you try to tell someone about it, just to get them to look it will be gone.

You know there is no point. But you have to do it anyway. You have to try. And maybe "Art" with a capital "A," maybe that's what Art is, just a cloud atlas. Just an attempt to map the unmappable.

And that's why I carry the ass-pocket notebook. For those times, when the sun-painted clouds need mapping.

"The world runs through us"

I could start with dreams, since I rarely have them. I hadn't dreamed on consecutive nights in more than a decade. "Sleeps in Fits" could be my Indian name. But there I was dreaming--super powers one night, confused in a distorted neighborhood the next. Deep sleep, Freud be damned.

I could start with inspiration, reading Jack Kerouac's poems, or Junot Diaz, Carl Sandburg or Matthew Dickman. Writers who read the world and themselves and swirl the two together on the page. Writers who look beyond language to what the words point at.

I could start with reading Ada Limon's "Shark in the Rivers," sitting along the Anacostia River while a Coast Guard Dolphin helicopter circle-hovers the river, three, four times; the river a debris-littered still in the days after Hurricane Sandy.

The pilot and I look at the river, neither of us wants to jump in.

The helicopter's WHUP is louder than the river, but not as loud as Sandy.

Ada Limon says, "This is the way / the world runs through us..."

and I wonder if she means with dreams, inspiration, words, poetry, helicopters and hurricanes.

I get why Thales fell in a well

I get why Thales fell in a well. The stars invented the word mesmerize for their own use.

I fling the kitchen trash bag in to the garbage can outside and crane my head back. The Milky Way, Orion's Belt, the dippers, whatever stencil you want to put over the night sky.

Philosophers and poets are kids, still fascinated by stars and clouds; still at home with their backs on the cool grass, their eyes searching, trying to make sense of the sky.

Thales is credited as the first Greek philosopher, before Socrates (pronounced "So-crates," Bill and Ted style), Plato or Aristotle who posterity came to know better. Thales, the story goes, was walking, eyes to the sky, and fell into a well, not paying any mind to where he was going.

You can think Thales a fool (history says otherwise) or you can envy his focus, his commitment to his sense of wonder. Philosophy and poetry both begin in wonder, expanding on Aristotle's notion.

When I take the trash out on a clear night, I get Thales. I'm glad there's not a well near our sidewalk.

Shazam, the lightning

If we were loosed from our bodies, freed from these shells, what would we be? Nothing? Maybe. Or would we become the quality that most defines us.

Roll that around in your head. Laughter, lightness, anger, grief. What word would people use to describe you, would you use to describe yourself, and how would you dig being that quality, post-body?

We would blow like a wind, inhabiting people and places that conjured us--laughter at a party, anger and fear in a back alley brawl, tears at a funeral. If that were the case, would we be more careful what qualities defined us? Who wants to be grief eternal? I'd go with laughter or wonder eternal anyday.

Let our bodies hit the floor. Not in a speed metal, mow 'em down manner, but a casting off of weight or restraint. Look at what is left and if you are glad of it.

Lately, I haven't dug what I'd leave. It doesn't feel like me.

This line of thinking sprung from a tangent. Junot Diaz was describing a character in the later pages of "Oscar Wao" and says of her, "Neither Captain Marvel, nor Billy Batson, but the lightning."

It was a magical lightning that transformed Billy into the Captain, made him superhuman. To describe a person as that lightning. Wow. I wrote it down and rolled it around in my head. I don't know what to make of it, except that I am struck by it...like...wait for it... lightning.

Diaz's words are also that lightning, transforming my thoughts about words and descriptions. About how to look at people. About how to look at myself.

Our 10-year-old pushes the ball up at field hockey practice. Our seven-year-old and a friend are on the playground pretending to be spiders caught in a giant web.

I am perched on a picnic table, in between the two. While the girls are in motion, I am still. Writing, reading fragments from Roland Barthes, who is mourning the death of his mother. Wisps of wind and rain spin evening melancholy.

And I wonder, what quality I would be past my body. But more, what quality will the girls remember me being? Is it how I'd want to be remembered?

A Barn on Mulberry Street

I've always wanted a barn. It's one of those Eastern Shore landscapes aesthetics that inhabits me. Barns are churches, a symbol of rural ethics, a structure that says America.

But my barn would not be a haven for horses or cows. Hay would be at a minimum. I grew up with barns, but I also grew up with the Bat Cave. Not the Bat Cave to be a superhero, but the Bat Cave as man cave, as a place where you surround yourself with the things that make you, you. Things that inspire, motivate, elevate.

The walls of my barn would be transition so that I could navigate the floor and wall by skateboard. Along with barn architecture, skatepark architecture fills me with awe. It invites you to inhabit the space, and the world, differently. To create, to move, to experiment. And in my barn, in my world, motion, creativity and experimentation are paramount.

My barn would be a library and a writer's studio. I have no interest in spending time in a place where I am not surrounded by books and the lofty thoughts of those who have come before and along with me. Rather than a desk, the writing space would be a big open table, where pages can be spread out and imbibed together, a collage of thoughts and phrases, paragraphs and verses,

The barn as a temple. But not just a temple on the landscape, or a skatepark or a library, but also a temple for the body. I've always pictured the barn having gymnastics rings hanging from the ceiling, exposed beams, a rural jungle gym, to keep the body fit.

Oh yes, the barn. But living in town doesn't lend itself to having a barn.

Unless you live on Mulberry Street. On the way home, I saw a barn. But not an ordinary barn, this barn had a skatepark, and a library... it was a jungle gym. And Van Halen and Jane's Addiction and Dr. Dog were playing concerts there...

The World at Seven

"What does he mean?" is the sound, the voice, the question of a seven-year-old trying to figure out the world. In this case, it is our seven-year-old asking her older sister what a character in a show was saying.

She is coming further into the agreement that is language. She seeks out words she knows, written on buildings or advertisements at Nationals Park, and speaks them quietly out loud.

Watching a Nationals game, she recites the numbers of players as they come up, "Drew Storen is 22, Kurt Suzueski (her pronunciation) is 24, Adam LaRoche is 25, Jesus Flores is 26, Jordan Zimmermann is 27, Jayson Werth is 28."

I'm floored by it, so I'll quiz her while we are watching.

"Who is 55?" She doesn't recognize call up Eury Perez, pinch-running for Michael Morse. We walk about September call-ups and she likes pitcher Zach Duke's name.

On a Sunday morning, she comes downstairs with her blanket wrapped around her like a cape. When you're seven, they are the same, blankets and capes.

Every day is a lineless sheet of paper in the morning, which is filled with doodles, wisdom, numbers, poetry and memories by bedtime.