Echo Lake

Climb the mountain pass, morning warming into hot July day, so few remain, navigate treacherous terrain around unknown corners and deposit at the foot of a lake. I hike through forests that look like those of my childhood, find the flower that gave me my name, listen for bears but hear only my own breaths, I am the only person for miles.

The fears grab me, too often they sit me down, take the muscles from out of my legs, the voice from my throat, keep me locked in the confines of a beloved home. But some days I put them in the backseat with me, say you can come but you cannot say anything, some days I drag myself across the coals of their eager hands and dare to look at what's beyond their horizon. 

I came home tired, happy, trekked out to the creek and sat staring at the moving waters. Count down minutes till farewell. But I am free, and when you are free, 

no goodbyes really hurt
quite so much.

Dusk

The sun sets late here in the north, lingers like in your home country, like a reluctant end, the familiarity feels comforting. I sit on the back porch letting my skin get cold, a swirl of poetry and stories and truths running laps through my insides. You came to the country to see more clearly, and you cannot take it back now. Sometimes the things we find by opening the door to hidden closets is exactly the monsters we feared would be there waiting. 

The point is to turn the light on anyways, drag them out into the middle of the room, make them less fearful by revealing their edges. Every monster ends somewhere. 

Even you.

Hellgate Canyon

A warm breeze moves in from the east, unassuming, gentle. You see the remaining days trickle from your calendar, it feels too soon, too soon, all you ever wanted was more time. You plead with the Universe for more time, look at each blade of grass like you want to commit it to memory. 

Earlier, along the lazy river, drifting through statuesque Montana canyons, you remarked at how easy it is to laugh in the company of others, how light your heart after a day spent with friends. Driving back home to the empty cabin under big sky lightning, you thought, and yet, how easy to live without.

It's harder to fight an illness,
when it was made in your bones.

Earlies

Wake with a shock, late after too many false starts in the middle of the silent nights. Strange dreams of holiday shopping, new apartments, and a climb across peaceful, icy waters bounce around your head like ping pong balls while you wait for the coffee to steep. 

a full writing day

The gift trickles across your eyebrows without knowing quite where to land. The coffee begins to sink in, remind you of the magic feeling when a page is blank, a day is new, an everything is possible. 

You sit down in front of the word processor, greet it like an old friend. Feel like a stranger to it, but at once that you've known each other your whole life. 

It feels like home. And you are ready to come back to it.

Ridge View

At the top of the switchbacks, where the mountain ridge peaks and the valleys spread in three directions, Big Sky making a name for itself without even trying, stood a lone picnic table. I climbed the last incline, through a sea of gold, long grass waving in the wind. Sat on the picnic table and looked out over the valley, searching for answers among the rolling hills, the cast fields, the cars in miniature making their way across the highway. 

It's always in silence that the answers come. I saw the core of what it is to be human, the core of what it is to be me, and how the two don't seem to intersect as much as they should.

The insight didn't seem so hard to swallow, more like getting glasses after the world was blurry for years. Like a psychic only telling you things you already know.

I took my core back down the mountainside. Made my way back to the little cabin in the valley. Sat in silence, holding the core in the palm of my hand, 

and wondering where it goes now.

I'd Forgotten How It Goes

I wake early in the cold morning, with just the slightest hint of magic across my eyelids, like sensing the season's first snow fall before you look out the window. Step out into the quiet cabin, where what remains of my life sits immobile, a still life painting in the mountains. Here is the typewriter, with a half written poem in its jaws. Here is the piano, preparing for a wedding, piles of paper trying to make sense of your literary ambitions. 

He summons you to work, and you cannot quite tell what's getting in your way, until the coffee sinks into your chest and reminds you of feelings long lost. You want to be writing, it whispers to you, the words are ready. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.

You arrived at the doorstep
of everything you were hoping you would find

and all you have to do is walk through.

Notes on Home

Shake out of a dream, your pulse high and your mind elsewhere. Returning to Earth takes longer when you were just light years away. The western wilderness remains steadfast outside your window, quiet in an early morning breeze, as the sun climbs the mountainside behind the house. A new day, a blank slate. You see the end of the road approaching, want desperately to find the metaphor that will shift you into a higher gear. Want to feel the deadline energy make you savor each moment.

Images of New York came across the screen last night, simple, sweet and quintessentially home. They asked if I miss the city, and when I said no, it was clear they heard what they wanted in the answer. But not missing it doesn't mean never wanting to go back. 

No, filled me with such joy. 

Because not missing New York now, means it is still a home I take for granted. 

Not missing New York now, means it has not been taken from me. 

I saw those images on the screen, and all I felt was peace.

Sunset Park

On the drive home, the sun set behind me, setting the grassy knolls aflame in bright washes of yellow. Remains of clouds become homing beacons, dotting the sky with bright lights and sharp edges. Turn off the highway to the small country road, feel it in your gut, it's time to pull over. 

Find the western horizon aflame, impossibly stretched across the endless miles of sky, pink feathers around the edges and a sliver of moon on the periwinkle ends. The air smelling of grass, cows, summer. Back in the car, see the first black bear of the trip, pausing as I pass, dusk settled by the time I reach the little cabin. The insight of the evening not to forget all the things you are already doing right, that are already going well. It's so easy to see the things not yet accomplished. 

But you've already seen a sunset the kind that takes your breath away, already seen a black bear, a night sky, already felt the afternoon breeze across your shoulders. You've already discovered a new story in the melee of your mind. 

There is much left to do. But oh, how many stars you hold already in your hands.

Past Lives

It's beginning to feel like it did. 

That time when I thought I could create a life for myself that would feel right, when I looked at the tracks behind me and liked where they'd walked. All the good things came when I was there, it's not lost on me. 

I am worse for the wear now, the telltale signs of having been raked across the coals crisscross my skin, singe my hair. But I looked in the mirror the other day, the one little mirror in this cabin whose other reflections are all of the mind, and I saw the glint in my eye returned. Recognized it like a dear old friend. 

The stars across the Montana sky are unending, twinkling into the silent night like it's not their job to find any answers, only keep you company while you do. 

For the first time in a long time, you feel like that is exactly enough.

burn

Another day, another struggle, they align on the horizon like patient orphans, waiting for a meal. I sit at the computer, trying to tell stories, but all that comes out is my own inadequacies: I am never enough. 

Back at the drawing board on the porch, I read old books and begin to see new patterns. How everything we do is a muscle to contract, and when the muscle is out of use, we must start from the beginning again. Fewer reps, lower weights, longer breaks. Breathe. A little stretching, a little more fun and games. It wasn't meant to make you cry, only to prove to yourself a little more of what you can do. 

Only to remind yourself how sweet it is to feel your muscles ache,
knowing you have used them for something good.

Just Wait

Four years of photographs scroll past your eyes, a backup too long awaited, a process at once painfully slow and pleasantly meditative. This is a life, you think, and you don't know what to make of it. Was it all you had hoped?

Of course not. Lives never are.

I take a break by going outside to sit under the night sky, only to find it overcast, only the big dipper shining steadily at the top of the mountain ridge. You fear you are squandering your days, your year, your life, but you do not yet know how to catch back up. The to do-lists are tempting, a fall back when all else fails you, but you wonder if the things you need to do can really be described in bullet points. The starry night sky last night seemed to have something else to say, and now it is cloaked in mystery, the whole thing seems to be on purpose. 

You remain in stillness, listening for sounds from the meadow, sounds from the woods, but hear nothing. The only sound is whatever is creaking in the attic. Your ears are ringing with the silence, a constant stream rushing past your ear drum. It occurs to you that you do not actually understand how sound works. 

It occurs to you that you do not actually know how very many things at all work. 

There, that's a good start, says the night sky. Now we are on our way.

Fenomena

I stay up too late, and lie lingering in the log bed until long after the first sun rays reach the thousand-piece puzzle outside the door. The birds on the roof sound more like bear cubs by the day, tumbling around and discovering their limbs in ways that are cuter at a distance. So many things are cuter at a distance, you think, but it's a thought that passes by without much engagement. 

In the country, unwanted thougths have a way of drifting off with the breeze across the meadows. 

A new story begins telling itself to you, quietly at first, like it's afraid your shop's no longer open for visitors, like it's afraid your ship has already sailed to more reasonable shores. You want to tell it you are not dangerous, but yelling from a distance rarely gives that impression, so you sit still, instead, and wait for it to approach. The woods are full of stories, you remember now, the woods are where rocks come alive and dangers lurk in soft moss, you grew up in these woods and that's why your people became storytellers to begin with.

We had to make sense of the shadows that follow us, the sounds from the attic, for a thousand years we have had to make our own light in the dark because the winters are long and unforgiving. I'm not saying it happens without struggle. 

I'm just saying if you sit still and watch it, the forest will let you know what you don't.

Tap

By evening, the skin across my back stretches in sunburn, not displeased. I guide the car into a dirt road off incomplete directions, we climb into the mountain only to be stopped by a hundred black cows, scowling at me in the road. At the top of the mountain, valleys stretch before me in all directions. I do not know how to capture it. 

Later, underneath a sky made bright by starlight, I think the same again. Here it is, the endless sky I’ve been waiting for. 

Here it is, the adventure i so nearly thought I could not give myself again. 

All the things that are to come

will come. 

Not on your schedule, 

but the right one. 

Drown

Wake with a headache, like an unearned hangover dragging you out of increasingly strange dreams. The country night takes its tithing. Let the morning sunlight trickle across the thistles outside while the coffee brings me round again, the cabin now touched at every corner by the writer's messy madness. People are like goldfish, they grow to the size of their bowl, he wrote on a napkin at the subway station, new years eve turned to day in 2007, one day before you left New York for the first time. 

(That was the worst time. It got easier, as you did it again. And this last time was the easiest, because you didn't really leave it at all. You think your greatest gift was having your cake and eating it, too, it doesn't come without sacrifice, but it's not a bad way to build a life.)

I sat for hours watching the sun set over pineclad mountainsides tonight, watched the light linger on its green velvet, like quiet waves in the wilderness, the deer walked by me like I didn't exist and I thought, good, I am becoming one with this log cabin. When at last it realized its mistake and leapt away, I went back into the little house, looked at the piles of words scattered across the couches, the tables, the floor. I grew into this bowl, like a heavy-handed metaphor for growing into this life I'm building. It's a strange, messy collection of abandoned trinkets and well-loved but crumpled pieces of paper. It's a shambled mosaic and a trip without destination, but I think I am on the right track, on the right highway though I don't know where it goes, and when I find out,
oh all this mess
will make sense, 

will seem like a perfectly executed
plan.

Muscles

As the noise in your brain quiets, it gets easier to hear the smaller voices. Perhaps they have been speaking all along, but without making such a fuss about it. You wish they had. 

They whisper of muscles unused, of why you do not crave things because the electricity has gone out of your system, because the tension grows weak with neglect. You forget you wanted things, forget you expected things, now their absence lines up like a firing squad, like a bad guilt trip without retribution. There's an ore of truth there, something is longing to be said. 

You have reached the abandoned mine. 

Pray for a rush to return.

Sink

Eventually, your toes begin to sink into the sand. Set up a piano, roll out a yoga mat, piles of words on every surface, the thousand-piece puzzle nearly complete. I work a ten-hour day and come dazed into the late afternoon sunlight, wondering at life. At the back of my head, a little signal buzzes, says things about what you are doing and why it is right, but you can't quite hear it completely yet, can't quite see the letters and words sharpen in your line of vision. 

You try not to scare it off. 

If you sit here a little more, let the coffee steep a little longer in the French press, watch the deer wade through the grass across the meadow behind your back porch, you imagine it might turn up. Imagine it might announce itself to you, let you write it down, let you remember it. 

I opened my notebook, just to remember to keep looking,
and a dozen, dried four-leaf clovers fell out. 

Went to bed early.
It'll come, in time.

Into the Void

You begin to wonder about your place in the grand scheme of things. It's easy to feel small when the sky is big, easy to feel big when the lens is myopic, easy to feel anything at all with a little manipulation, really. But the gnawing feeling when you go to bed in the dark, silent night is that there's a core to your own knowledge you've spent too many years burying, and that it'll take more than a few nights of solid sleep to unearth it. 

The unease begins to tickle its way under your skin, make you uncomfortable. You recognize the necessity, even as it itches, you are tempted to dip your whole body in its acid bath, see what image develops.

See who you are when you've scratched your skin
raw.

On Writing

Two days in, and I've begun losing track of time. A jigsaw puzzle appears in one end of the little cabin, the mint green typewriter is sprawled on a dining table. I spend the day clearing the upstairs of dead flies, not particularly inspiring nor, it turns out, gratifying, but the coating of lemon-scented floor cleaner lets you sink one step deeper into a house that is as much of a home as you have, right now. You begin to learn the schedule of the deer, as you lose track of your own. Surely there are things you ought to be doing. 

Your desire to run off into the woods
and not know when you'd return to civilization
is stronger than ever. 

I read three books a day now, lie in the tall grass staring up at blue skies, rediscover old stories I never finished telling, Stephen King says you should spend 4-6 hours a day reading and writing, and I wonder if he remembers what it was like not to have money for rent. I stare at October, think maybe I buy myself another month. 

Think maybe I'm trying to buy myself a whole other life.

Crane Wife

When I return to the little cabin in the afternoon, the sandhill cranes are bobbing up and down in the meadow, concealing their young, their motives. The soles of my feet are black from walking around the cabin, but my steps are light, the steps of a woman no longer carrying the weight of the world, or just her own expectations of it. I wade through waist-high grass to reach the horses, as they come calling when I open the back door. 

The women in town told me all the places I had to visit downtown, the little shops for trinkets, the best deli in the valley. I smiled and nodded, fully aware that I'd not visit one of them. As soon as I could, I left town. I want the cacophony of avenue B, otherwise, give me the blissful silence of a land untamed, give me waist-high grass and sandhill cranes, give me timeless time and back porches made for reading, give me bourbon the kind that comes in a water glass without ice only because you had none. Give me dirty feet and pristine sleeps, there's a gate to the horse paddock that lets you walk right to the waters edge, there's ten acres of grass at the bottom of these log steps, I have lost track of time and that is
exactly
what I was meant to.

Montaña

The cabin and I come to each other in patient reverence. The creaking sounds from upstairs reveal themselves to be birds, happily hopping around in the morning sunlight as it crests the mountains behind us. Possibly raccoons. The dogs in the horse paddock turn out to bark at everything, not just me. Each window waits for its turn to introduce its uniquely breathtaking view. I track time only in recording when sunlight creeps past the tops of the pine trees, when it reaches the couch with the moose and fish prints, so perfect for a morning read, when it reaches the back porch, so perfect for drinking bourbon but also everything else. In every other way, time proves to be irrelevant. 

The tick checks come and go, at will. 

It’s a fragile moment, the beginning of an endeavor. You have all of the possibility and none of the wherewithal, all of the optimism but none of the urgency to see it through. The lack of urgency is crucial: you are not here for an end goal, but for the chance to ride a wave to any of its possible conclusions. To ride a hundred waves, wherever they lead, to relish the quiet moment in the lineup, where all you have to do is stare out at the sea and wait to see what the sea will hand you as bait. 

You consider taking up fly-fishing. 

Rumor has it the creek across the field is brimming with trout. 

Cherry Lane

The road off the highway is so small that you miss it the first time, have to circle back around and drive 40 miles an hour to get it right. Shuffle down a wobbly gravel road that only lets you see five feet ahead between the pines. What supposedly used to be a lawn is now a bucolic field of knee-high grass and clover. You wedge your car within the sea of green, drag what remains of your possessions to the unassuming log cabin, unearth a key from its hiding place: here is home for the foreseeable future, because you have no other to claim as yours. 

On the way up, past the winding mountain pass in a little town that tried to entice visitors with its historic downtown, I bought a few vital supplies: water, watermelon, wine. When the cashier asked how my day was going so far I didn’t know how to begin to tell her. Didn’t know how to explain that everything was just as it should be, that everything was nothing but bliss. 

Sit on the back porch with a tumbler of cheap Malbec, watch two horses peacefully pass by with nothing on their agenda but grazing. The sun beams bright above the forest-jagged mountain ridge, a cool breeze sifts through the valley and out the other side. 

Just as it should be, 

as it were. 

A softer landing

After you arrive in the desert, your mind lies silent. A home office appears, you resent it but resign yourself to its four corners. Perhaps it is a break, a chance to do your laundry, repack the station wagon, perhaps it is nothing but a blessing. You sleep a heavy sleep, eat good food, move your limbs as though all of this was normal, you have not yet landed in the new, strange reality you've created for yourself. In the back of your mind, poetry begins to stretch its limbs toward the sunlight, a soft curiosity settles in your spine. Maybe, maybe there is something out there to be found. 

You pack your bags again.
Go back out there into it.

Springs

Colorado is an endless plain, slight tumbles of grasslands full of flowers but endless horizon, until you turn a corner find yourself right at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. Climb ten thousand feet into the air, lose your breath, lose your cool, America has changed itself before your eyes again, you are born anew. 

Stop in the little mountain town and find a familiar face, you find her everywhere, and this is the gift. Soak in hot springs, revel in a moment out of the ordinary, try to keep up with the altitude, the dry air, let it remind yourself to you. A young man looks your way enough times at the bar that you know what he is asking, but this is not the time for it. Come back in autumn. 

Go to sleep under a thousand western stars. Tomorrow you cross another border, and make your way home.

Cave

Strange dreams follow you into the Midwest morning, a quiet motel parking lot watching over your deepest sleeps. Over scrambled eggs and midgrade coffee in the lobby, you try to make sense of where you are, but you are too content to worry. A penny appears on the muted carpet as you make your way back upstairs. Because of course it does. You consider DSM diagnoses and wonder if this is what mania is, a conviction that the Universe has turned its smiling face upon you, that now is your time again. 

The schedule says mornings are for work, but all you want to do is write, now. All you want is the road, and music, and billowing clouds across the Kansas plains, all you want is the zen of an open horizon, you fought so hard to get here, you do not want to lose a minute of it to the real world. 

Remind yourself that this is the real world. 

Just because it feels too good to be true
doesn't mean you can't still make it yours.

Missouri

By late morning, you drop her at the airport, a surreal farewell in a strange town, days of incessant chatter abruptly turned to silence along I70. A playlist has been prepared for you, lovingly left waiting for a time when the car would have room for it, when the road would be hundreds of miles before rest. A retired couple at a truck stop marvel at your travels, but you don't understand quite while. At last sunset trickles across the highway and the car slows to a stop, somewhere in Missouri, four states later. You wonder how to make the most of the stillness, but all that appears is words. 

The adventure is upon you, now, America at your feet and everything you own in an old station wagon somewhere in the Midwest. You feel your lungs stretch, your mind wander. It seems too good to be true, 

but I'll take it.

Music City

The little car careens down Kentucky hillsides, all lush, billowing greens and patient corn until the Nashville skyline appears from below a ridge. The big city annoys you, with its criss-crossing highways and pretentious skyscraper shadows. Were you not meant to sit in solitude under the stars? The server at the high-end restaurant in a newly uncovered neighborhood asks where you are from, and the words New York sound foreign on your tongue, like when someone asks where you are from and you tell them the city where you grew up. I am from nowhere, now; I am from everywhere.

In the middle of the night, I lie awake, unable to sleep despite my best attempts. Toss and turn, cursing the late meal, the last drink, the restless mind, until I realize: here is the silence I was asking for, here is a moment to simply sit in the marvel of my steps. Did bartender at the dive bar not cut most of the drinks from your tab? The road is still with you, in all the shapes it may take.

101

It is your grandmother's birthday. Nine years since she passed, and you still carry her in the trill of your laugh, in your delicate warmth in hosting a coffee. You spent 32 years with her voice in your ears; this does not disappear just because the voice grows silent. We live on in the people who love us. We order another round of bourbon drinks, call it research, and watch the early evening sun trickle through the leaves. You spend money like you had it. In the corner of your eye, the road beckons on the horizon. 

You are not there yet, but soon, soon, you will be ready to claim it for
your own.

Triple Crown

By the time the tornado alert tumbles across our phones, we are safely tucked into a tasting room, pretending to find notes of cherry and nutmeg in our glasses. Tree branches fold themselves across the Kentucky highway, but the sun is back before we've even reached the outskirts of town. You feel a soft drawl arrange itself at the outer edges of your tongue, feel a former version of yourself ask follow up questions and let curiosity guide you into small slivers of strangers' lives. She is not unfamiliar, she was just too far away to remember without this feeling in your muscles. The hotel concierge gives you a better room, the bartender spends an hour giving you recommendations, you remember how a smile can buy you anything if you're ready for it. 

You're only on day two and already you fear the time is slipping between your fingers, fear America disappears from under your wandering feet, but it is not true, it is only just beginning to sink into your spine. When people ask where you're from, you still say the East Village, but the truth is you are from nowhere now, the truth is you are from wherever you stand in this moment. The hotel has plush robes and a deep bath tub, the sheets are crisp, the night is silent. A secret lies waiting. 

You have plenty of time to find it.

...and I walked off to look for America

Day one: Columbus, Ohio. Verdant fields, bubbling hills, clear skies. After hundreds of miles of smoke-filled Pennsylvania weight, we breathe a sigh of relief. I bring my plants inside, the scrappy three orphans that I could not leave behind. Impossible pasts lie behind me: two days ago, watching the movers put everything I own into a space no larger than a closet; one day ago, walking around an empty apartment, that looked nothing like the home I had made it, but reminded me of the moment we first met. I cried, and handed over my keys. Just earlier this morning, Canal street waking into its perpetual chaos, the New Jersey Turnpike twisted like a riddle it begged you to stay and solve. 

The last morning on sixth street, I walked out to the river to say my goodbyes. Got caught up in a phone call, got caught up in avoiding the inevitable farewell, pounding its way toward me at breakneck speed. Lost the chance to look for clovers, but thought, just one glance, just one new patch where I've never looked before, just taking a chance where it's given. 

It took me not one minute, and I found it: a five-leaf clover, perfectly wrapped around itself like a flower, or a star, or a miracle. I nodded to the river. I nodded to sixth street. 

I took my five-leaf clover and I got on the road.