Tectonics Thinner than Air

Mayletter

May. These are the days of limbo. There is much to learn walking the streets of warm spring cities into the night. Scarcely have I heard crickets yet, but they are incubating somewhere like so much else of summer and the anticipations that this season brings about in the many ways of one’s being. Often time passes in oscillations, and it is possible to see the correspondences between things. One pass brings me to Detroit some May ago and some May later another brings me back. I was in Detroit yesterday, and there was a familiarity to it that had much to do with scent and the height of grasses in front of waning front porch paint. There was a treelessness to the city that has been deep in lore in years yore for its rooting elms. On a quiet street an older gentleman sat frozen in the heat on the porch of his house. Screened in and across the street another and I played blues on the guitar.

These are days of passing, and that is another oscillation of time. For the resource-less (here I mean non-pedal transportation) there is much waiting in passing. I go from place to place and take up areas of sleeping that are stored away like chestnuts in a squirrel’s world. I am fortunate in this way. It means the transit between points in place is laden with some purpose, with the progression of more than land and certainly calling, ideals, mission, and inquiring. There are many ideals to attend. I am hear now in past home of mine where a great knot of synthesis enwove my own being. This sounds hollowly poetic, maybe trite, but if that’s the case then I’m glad for it. I am deeply persuaded to open up a continuing story, the weight of it exudes its time, subtle but profound like the passing of tectonic plates. In the heat of the day I may be waiting for some future, and I can feel the friction of subducting time.

I missed a moment last night to open this story, and now my stomach is teeming with a fresh and intoxicating anxiety and I can hear the three things I undoubtedly believe in—my past, the ontology of being, and the mutuality of experience—urging me to brace and embrace peaks in time and place where we have—they are popularly called—windows. There are creatures thinner than the air that press and press with psalters of what next. Knowing and doing is a tricky duo. Like May, these things are limbo. They too are oscillations and one begets the other over and over and recursively again.

To my people out there, I want you to know something. This world is very apparent, it seems. As a creation it is continuously urging. Know, then do. Risks are often good investments. I am poor at speech so May is a time for letters.

I walked late at night around the streets of Cambridge last Monday. This city is quiet early in the morning, and a night wind in the trees coursed modestly about, bending the shadows of the street lights. There is much to learn on these walks. I have felt urged, and I now I must do. Little was more apparent on those streets, and now that I am passing, there are ideals to attend.