How to Love a Wolf: Day 13, June 15, 2019

How to Love a Wolf: Day 13

I’ve taken again to noticing how sound changes my body. At the micro level; the level that requires me to ‘tune out’ of most conversation. Just now, the leaves in their particular June ratios of wet-dry saturations; the hiss of their contact spreads an entire block, observed as sonic missives, on nights like this one. A car turns the corner, and it seems the rev of the engine spurs the leaves’ uptick in sound. The crickets, in and out. The planes cutting through the spreading clouds. And the clouds. They shape-shift above me like a dome, hiding in one dramatic point the bright light of the almost full moon.

It occurs to me that getting older (I’m chucking here) is my natural state. I have always longed for the wholehearted permission of the universe to pay attention to small things. Things, like the sound of leaves in June, and the parting of clouds concealing a moon, that happen all the time and, in their mundanity, fall through the sieve of youthful drive, striving, ambition and their cousins comparison, jockeying, and strategy. Some part of me has always been most concerned with the passing of clouds in relation to the particular tenor of leaves. Somehow that register of life has always reached out to me.

The moon is coming through, and her brightness astonishes me. She dives behind a fast-moving indigo cloud now, and emerges again, each time more luminous than this screeching screen in front of me; each is worshipping a different god/dess, to be sure.

*****

Will I ever want to be seen again?

Will I ever want to be seen again, save for the seeing omnipresent in these leaves and these clouds, the rumbles and hums of these distant machines, the cars and planes and purring garish streetlights?

Dance took me thirty years ago. She took me like a superhero goddess of rescue might have taken me; a rescue, performed on the sly, calmly, but with perseverance and sufficient force. Dance, this superhero goddess, reached into a downward going spiral and before I knew what cycles or spirals or flow were pulled me into the home-spiral of movement, devotion, obsession, clear focus, making, showing up, doing it again, again, again; and an internal marketplace of seeing and being seen. [No, I am not referring specifically to capitalism.] It has been my world, my ocean, this goddess realm. But now there’s another world returned to me. A world of discrete moment-to-moment breezes, not generic ‘breeze’, not just “a” breeze. But this or that particular breeze, moving from this or that tree, massive and regal, distant, sonically assertive, telling itself in its own time to this tree that is near and familiar and in some ways, but only some, easier to comprehend. And when the clouds part and the moon shines brighter than this screen I know they are talking to each other—the clouds, the leaves, the orchestra of trees, the moon in its comings and goings. And I can feel them—just as I did as a child, on the lake or on the side streets walking home in the wintry dark toward 171 Essex at Caley, noting with trepidation and thrill the particular possibly dangerous creak of weak October branches—talking, also, to me, hoping, (or is that me hoping ?) that I will listen.