It’s afternoon. It’s the third week in May. Depending on from where one counts. It’s very windy. I’m suspended between two trees in a sail. The waves, lake waves, are crashing into the boulders (lake rocks) and the ducks are wandering around looking proud to be on land. The even more proud ducks are circumnavigating the body of water. There is hot coffee. I’m not feeling like a bunch of commas. Periods are a stillness punc. The period is not exactly a statement of certainty. It is a statement of comfort. Even with ambiguity. Everyone talks about Hemmingway. But they like periods. I like curves. Periods are curved. As long as you look closely and see the circle rather than merely the dot. Is there a difference between a dot and a circle. You can ask questions with periods. They are not rhetorical. They operate as an herbal medicine. Without clarity of mechanism. Science demands mechanism clarity. Or at least the scientific “community”. The establishment. The Ogre. The Demon. The Castle. When a group of people become a vague thing. Inscrutable. Society. Elites. Them. People who do this. People who scoff. People who write with periods. And scary quotations. People who make tropes and over-use them in their writing.
I wonder if the waves of my life are visible in my writing. Sometimes people tell me that they are. That they can see when the tide is out and the storm surge is replacing the sand with flotsam. I’m glad for flotsam. And for the observers of my writing who wonder if they are reading tea leaves in my sentences. Spoilers: the tea leaves have messages in them. Read for understanding. Read for comprehension. Read for feeling. Read without reason. Read as a storm at night, as the flashes of lightning illuminate the eyes of a herd of raccoons. Read fire. Read for the periods, the spacing. Read double and single spaced. Read what you write. Forget what you read.
Reading with forgetfulness is one of my most important “practices”. I put practices in quotes because I believe that practices are meant to be forgotten in between sessions and the feeling from one session to the next need not be categorized and saved in specific memory. Saving rooms in the mind palace for important stuff, like faces. I love the way faces spread out and come together. To read a face that is writing is the joy of my life. To see eyes and lips and jaw singing to the lyrics of ears and nose and cheeks is the music I wish to hear every day for hours and hours. It’s the playlist I wish to never stop playing. I fall into this reading and I feel lost and forgotten and I do not need to remember or be found. Read me your face sometime, I don’t think I’ve read this part.
The smell of a lake that is coming back to life is noxious and stirring. I feel toxically cocktailed, my head out the side window of a car going forty, a dog that couldn’t be any other way. I smell the life and I read the day. I think of faces and feelings and muskrats. I wonder where the cranes are today. I can only hear one bird, singing to be heard over the waves. I wonder about the value of things, about the value of my life. Value is an intuition that is trained as a habit and then felt as an intuition. I could not put a price on this day. Please do not pay for this book with anything of value.
I see four pairs of duck couples and one mallard. I think we put love and relationships and sex on a pedestal. I love these things. I love these ducks. I have a relationship with this day. We’ll be together forever, but only until midnight. Can I live with that? Can the day? I think so. If I see the day’s leaves, the wind. If I listen to the day’s waves. If I love the day well, today. If I’m there for the day. If I love the day’s quacking, even when it’s lost on the wind and the waves. If I see the shimmers on the day’s lake. If I see the day’s man walking by. If I see the woman on the phone. If I really see the two people in chairs, talking with their hands. If I listen closely to the one bird who’s making it through. If I forgive myself for killing the mosquito that the day sent to my sail. Then, at midnight, the day and I will be at peace.
Roman Ryan 