This train is bound for somewhere. I really don’t know where; do you?
What I do know is that my heart is in it.
Is your heart bounding this way, too? If so, hop aboard! I’ll scooch things around to make room.
Here we goooo!
Happy to have you!
This trip is blessed by Bees.
The Beeing is constructing something.
There are hints of happenings bigger than human-scale, to which perceptive humans are privy.
Birches, roses, and baby’s breath bless us, too.
Then my mind started flipping me the business. As judgments began happening, things began breaking and dysfunctioning. Had to come to terms with that before it got out of hand. Honestly, sometimes I’m so disgusted, that I’m supposed to do anything in a world where everything is broken. Straight lines to be followed so absolutely and a wiggly, curly world that wants nothing to do with control.
—Facet 44, in a text to me (shared with permission)
We reach remote outposts.
We continue on across the desert.
There’s growth even here.
We pass a castle!
The ramparts are crumbling, revealing layers underneath.
That’s a good thing—the natural flow.
Whatever flows, grows.
A river is at rest along the path of least resistance.
We reach the land of bells and bare bones. At first, it smells like incense.
There are many kinds of rivers.
When going over cattleguards, we lift our feet for Larry, who always lifted his feet when going over cattleguards.
Upon arrival at our desert destination, I offer a piece of walnut to the spirits of the place. It is avidly accepted.
We all make up our ceremonies as we go along, right?
—Sherman Alexie, “Do You Know Where I Am?”
Blessings shine from above.
They shine below, too.
This is where we will be for a while. I make offerings of tobacco and walnuts to the four directions.
That road up the hillside leads to the Outer Limits.
These Outer Limits.
Tranformation will happen here.
The Rock of Seeing will look out for us.
I dress in red and green to approximate the land, and climb to greet all these new teachers.
My heart opens.
The Southern God watches.
Twisted Juniper watches, too, as alive in death as in life, appearing in many iterations all around.
And these are the Green People. I give them sips of water and sit for a bit on the shady, lee side of their tree—so I’m lee but not drunken.
Here’s the Lone Dancer. She’s like me—except I have you.
In fact, she has others, too. No one ever really dances alone. We just need varying amounts of space, at different times and with different people.
“Everyone wanted to call her sweetheart. But she only danced for me. That’s how it was. She told me that every other step was just for me.”
“But that’s only half of the dance,” I said.
“Yeah,” my father said. “She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain’t healthy.”
—Sherman Alexie, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”
Speaking of space, there’s Facet 44, our human host.
He has gone through a lot to bring us here. He just came to check on us.
We’re all fine.
He and I both like space, which works out well.
I like other things, too. How about you?
After his little visit, it’s back to just me and you and everybody else.
As Bat and Moon blanket us with the first evening’s coolness, I brush my teeth and put food supplies and other sweet-smelling things (like toothpaste) into an ammo can, to minimize the chance of a bear catching a whiff and bumbling in for a taste.
It’s quieter than I’ve known, possibly in years. When’s the last time you knew a deep and peaceful silence?
The native spirits feel hardy. The air is good.
We rest well. I dream of ravens-turned-buzzards who watch out for me.
The senses we get of Bear and even Mountain Lion aren’t threatening.
Just before sunrise, someone like a meadowlark or thrush starts up singing. Cows low from across the river far below, and a raven caws.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire could fly.
Once, he jumped off the roof of the tribal school and flapped his arms like a crazy eagle. And he flew. For a second, he hovered, suspended above all the other Indian boys who were too smart or too scared to jump.
“He’s flying,” Junior yelled, and Seymour was busy looking for the trick wires or mirrors. But it was real. As real as the dirt when Thomas lost altitude and crashed to the ground.
He broke his arm in two places.
“He broke his wing,” Victor chanted, and the other Indian boys joined in, made it a tribal song.
“He broke his wing, he broke his wing, he broke his wing,” all the Indian boys chanted as they ran off, flapping their wings, wishing they could fly, too. They hated Thomas for his courage, his brief moment as a bird. Everybody has dreams about flying. Thomas flew.
—Sherman Alexie, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”
I climb back up to the Rock of Seeing. It’s a bit chilly, with a slight breeze, and I haven’t brought any extra layers.
You must think yourself abandoned, but it is not so. It has never been so.
You are wanted. You are needed. You belong with us.
Come home, dear niece.
We cannot wait to welcome you.
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
Will I last up here until sunrise?
Yes! The Sun comes up.
A raven trills. I trill in return. I think the ravens nest up there somewhere.
The Sun is warm. From the distant river, ducks quack and Canada geese honk.
Anyway, as I danced, a few people recognized me and started talking to everybody around them. Soon enough, the whole powwow knew it was me swinging my feathers. A few folks jeered and threw curses my way. But most just watched me. I felt like crying. But then one of the elders, a great-grandmother named Agnes, trilled like a bird. She said my name quietly but everybody heard it anyway. Indians stand to honor people, so she stood for me. Then another elder woman trilled and said my name. And then a third. Soon enough, a dozen elder women were standing for me. I wept. I realized that I wasn’t dancing for Junior. No, I was dancing for the old women. I was dancing for all of the dead. And all of the living. But I wasn’t dancing for war. I was dancing for my soul and for the soul of my tribe.
—Sherman Alexie, “Cry Cry Cry”
I get some unexpected acupuncture by resting my feet in an old thorn pile. Have you tried it? It’s all the rage. The thorns are easy enough to pull out once the acupuncture treatment is complete.
Just don’t tangle with this beauty.
I’ve never experienced her sting, but from what I’ve heard, that level of acupuncture is off the charts.
He was a sweet and poetic boy for somebody so young. We held each other tightly and didn’t let go even as the ants crawled on us.
“It’s okay,” he said. “They won’t bite us."
And they didn’t.
—Sherman Alexie, “Scenes from a Life”
Raven circles.
Something wriggles inside her then, half terror and half thrill. Like when you take the stairs too fast and almost slip. The moment when you catch yourself and look down at what could have happened, some disaster narrowly escaped.
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
We can head back to the tent now.
. . . But what is safe? Tombs are safe. . . . Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
Back at camp, the Phoenix, my campstove, roars up to heat water for breakfast in no time, with tinder and twigs from around the campsite.
I put in cranberries, walnuts, and local honey.
Having spent years in material privation myself—though never, mercifully, nearly to the extent Dostoyevsky endured—and being always grateful for how those times annealed me, how they made me less afraid of poverty and hardship, more willing to take risks others might not, to take less materially secure paths in life (one resulting in the birth of Brain Pickings), I can’t help but wonder how much this harrowing experience fomented Dostoyevsky’s extraordinary perseverance as an artist against the tides of convention and the constant specter of poverty.
—Maria Popova, “Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life”
After breakfast, it’s time to explore.
I find some end-of-the-rainbow gold—slivery here.
“Never been this far north,” he muses, glancing over his shoulder. “Have you?”
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
Could this be home?
This could be home.
Seems like I’m always looking for home. Seems like I don’t usually fit in with other humans. I’m not exactly like Roy here, but I get the sense that you and I both have our stories of longing and isolation, and people who have kept us going.
Some called Roy a morphodite or hesheit. Nurses forced him to wear a pink sweatsuit after they discovered his female anatomy. But a devout Baptist cooked Roy dinner every Christmas. A Pentecostal fought a pastor who refused to let Roy worship. The roughneck barber shaped Roy’s crew cut every week without question. The people in Delhi weren’t the two-dimensional stereotypes we see in the news. They had their own stories of longing and isolation. They understood Roy because they thought of themselves as misfits in the bigger world beyond.
—Casey Parks, Diary of a Misfit
These bones found their home.
For most of his life, he’d loved solitude. Walking through the deep woods, he often imagined he was the only person left in the world, the only survivor of a nuclear war or a smallpox epidemic. During these fantasies, Frank lived alone for fifty years until the day when he curled into a ball at the base of a beautiful pine and died like an old dog, whereby the human race ceased to exist.
—Sherman Alexie, “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church?”
These bones have been home since before they were bare.
The day heats up quick. A snag points a way back.
We thank it and go our own way, for now.
And we’re back.
But something is missing, I realize.
Where is he?
—Guy talking to himself on the street as I passed by
There’s a blank spot.
“You’re just trying to fill up all the emptiness inside you,” said my best friend. “You’re just trying not to be lonely.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But I fail to see why feeling that way should prevent me from trying not to feel that way.”
I remember all of my lovers’ names. I write them down in a book with the Titanic painted on the cover. But, on the front page, I’ve only sketched a nameless portrait of that Indian boy fancy dancer, who made love to me in a wheat field that had been left fallow that season.
—Sherman Alexie, “Scenes from a Life”
I guess there always has to be at least a little mystery from which to weave.
We didn’t talk much. One, because my father didn’t talk much when he was sober, and two, because Indians don’t need to talk to communicate.
—Sherman Alexie, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”
In gratitude for their shade and companionship, I give our campsite juniper friends some water.
I notice for the first time that one of them has been cut to the quick and made a golden gem of it.
. . . Mary could take on the role of Our Lady of Mercy, because she is a God, an archetype, an expression of a potential that humanity collectively could manifest: mercy, grace. She has things to teach all of us about how to live with more mercy and grace. But none of us can take on her role of Our Lady of Mercy, forgiving, facing, holding, and transforming all the wrong doing, negligence, cruelty and cyclical trauma in the world. That is a job for a Higher Being, or, if you like, humanity as a collective. As individuals we cannot take on a job so large. As humans, we will remain ambivalent in our grace and mercy sometimes. We will have boundaries and limits and necessary refusals that an archetype or God does not need to have.
. . . But collectively we are capable of creating cultures and containers that can do this work.
—Clementine Morrigan, “Some Things Only God Can Forgive”
Are we making golden gems here?
I needed more than my own words, though.
—Casey Parks, Diary of a Misfit
Could we put our words together?
Drowsiness descends in the heat and peace, which drift us toward another nightfall.
* * *
Morning comes on chilly, clouding over with a possibility of thunderstorms.
A turkey down by the river gobbles.
I batten down the hatches. Heavy air presses me into my tent.
With the onset of rain, I skip food, sink in, and bliss in and out between its pattering and sleep.
. . . Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.
—Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”
The THWAPTHWAPTHWAPTHWAP of a helicopter, probably for sightseeing, startles me and then fades.
The Indian studied my face for a while. Then he made some judgment about me. I could see him make his decision. He set down the dead bird, picked up the shotgun, walked close to one of the windmills, and shot it.
He stepped forward and closely studied the shotgun blast in the windmill, as if he expected the machine to bleed. Then he stepped back and shot the windmill again. He reloaded, shot, reloaded, shot, reloaded, shot, and then stepped back and looked up at the windmill. It was still moving, working, and ready to kill birds. It was impervious.
After a while, he turned and walked away.
—Sherman Alexie, “Green World”
Before long, the Sun comes back out, enticing me out across dampened sand, back up to the Rock of Seeing to catch more of her rays and check my phone.
Raven calls from one direction, Canada Goose from another. Another raven joins in, launching the two corvids into deep discussion.
A slight breeze brings the chill back, returning me to the tent for leggings and a sip from a bottle of wine that was recommended by the clerk at the general store on the drive out.
Rain sprinkles once again as the light dims toward evening.
* * *
The next morning moves even slower than the previous one. For a while I feel the need to do nothing, beyond feeding a tree and going back to bed. Deer come by, torn between nervousness . . .
. . . and curiosity.
Eventually the spirit moves me to walk the mile to the tiny town for provisions.
By the time we return, I’m wiped out, unused to the elevation.
I go back to doing nothing.
The days and nights continue to unspool. The Moon widens from crescent to half.
I grabbed a beer from the fridge. The cabin’s walls were covered in posters advertising bass-fishing spots, and I studied them for a few minutes, then I sat on the floor. I tore the beer’s label away.
. . . I no longer asked any celestial being to give me things, and I wasn’t even sure if I believed in heaven anymore, but something in the cabin quieted me that evening. Something told me to ask. I didn’t feel close to God anymore, though, so I shut my eyes and prayed to my mom and grandmother.
. . . I wanted permission, a sign that I hadn’t wasted a decade searching for something that shouldn’t be found. . . .
I prayed in fragments, half sentences . . . . I didn’t say amen. I opened my eyes, and when I looked up, I saw headlights sweeping across the cabin wall. No one drives that deep into the park by accident, and there weren’t any cabins farther in than ours, so I knew what those headlights meant. I jumped up. I stashed my beer outside on the deck, then I ran to the front door. I knew before I opened it that Mark would be standing on the other side.
—Casey Parks, Diary of a Misfit
“To share with friends,” the label on the wine bottle says.
We make friends.
If you don’t like the things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories. Instead of remembering the bad things, remember what happened immediately before. That’s what I learned from my father. For me, I remember how good the first drink of that Diet Pepsi tasted instead of how my mouth felt when I swallowed a wasp with the second drink.
—Sherman Alexie, “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock”
I don’t swallow my friend; I just admire her.
The Moon, having gone into hiding, smiles and comes back out.
This night, in bed, I get an intense physical sensation, a shaking that isn’t fear or a chill. It isn’t painful; it’s like something breaks loose that needs to break.
Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. . . .
Moonlight caught the breaking wave as it approached. The others whooped at its arrival, and whooped off after it, chasing into the night with a scatter of intersecting torchbeams. Alone, she and I talked about how impossible things sometimes happened, things you wouldn’t believe unless you’d witnessed them for yourself. Our mood was thoughtful, sombre even, rather than ecstatic.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
* * *
In the morning’s hypnopompic state, I hear German hikers wandering around my tent, talking loudly, annoying me.
“Hey, you boys,” Norma yelled and jumped out of her car. “Leave him alone.”
If it had been someone else, even another man, the Indian boys would’ve just ignored the warnings. But Norma was a warrior. She was powerful. She could have picked up any two of the boys and smashed their skulls together. But worse than that, she would have dragged them all over to some tipi and made them listen to some elder tell a dusty story.
The Indian boys scattered, and Norma walked over to Thomas and picked him up.
"Hey, little man, are you okay?” she asked.
Thomas gave her a thumbs up.
“Why they always picking on you?”
Thomas shook his head, closed his eyes, but no stories came to him, no words or music. He just wanted to go home, to lie in his bed and let his dreams tell his stories for him.
—Sherman Alexie, “This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona”
The Germans move on. Also I feel a wasp land on my mouth, hear a soothing sound of dishwashing water running, and then hear quiet, respectful footsteps, at which point I fully awaken. No wasp is in the tent, and when I peek out, there is no sign of other humans. All is quiet.
I feel as though I’m blooming.
I am so happy. I am so scared.
The two, it turns out, can walk together, hand in hand.
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
Ravens are prominent all day. Another long conversation ensues between two of them, one of whom circles and dances. Then she quietly flaps past me.
At the Rock of Seeing, I bat away flies who are in love with me.
The Moon is almost full.
* * *
The next day is the last full day here. I stay in bed until late morning, because that’s all I want to do. I decide to fast lightly until afternoon. I read in the spot between the junipers; share a moment with a lizard; just be.
I had absolutely no sense of wasting my time: rather, it was the opposite way round—that this was what my time was now for.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
I eat a handful of cranberries. Organize my stuff. Text with a friend. Watch insects.
With a loud WHOOSH, two buzzards zoom low to the ground to join two others in circling under a fifth one. They spiral from north to south.
Before a late-afternoon dinner, I spend a short time on the Rock of Seeing, soaking it all in.
Then I finish the last pot of oatmeal I’ll have in this place, at least this round, and go back to reading. A tiger swallowtail swoops in front of me, almost touching the book.
. . . He only winks and rises.
“Put the right words into the world,” he says, “never know what you’ll catch.”
Olivia stills.
I have sent these letters to every corner of the country.
May this be the one that finds you.
—V. E. Schwab, Gallant
The final night is a peaceful one of gray, blue, and white sky coloring toward pink and then the full gray of late dusk.
* * *
In the morning, I make one more walk into town, for a hearty breakfast.
Then it’s time to break camp.
Blooming cacti lace our departure.
* * *
As soon as I take a seat in the train station waiting area, a huge blast of wind blows one of the outside doors open and then shut again.
We follow the wind.
Two ravens do, too.
We ride off into the setting Sun.
It’s a new day.
And the ravens keep coming.
This is my delight, thus to wait and watch at the wayside where shadow chases light and the rain comes in the wake of the summer.
Messengers, with tidings from unknown skies, greet me and speed along the road. My heart is glad within, and the breath of the passing breeze is sweet.
From dawn till dusk I sit here before my door, and I know that of a sudden the happy moment will arrive when I shall see.
In the meanwhile I smile and I sing all alone. In the meanwhile the air is filling with the perfume of promise.
—Rabindranath Tagore, “Gitanjali 44”