Proximity (vol. 7, no. 5)

Here are a few things I’m sharing this month:

1. Question:

To wonder. To wonder the way a small child
might wonder when seeing a roly poly for the first time —
oh, look at all those legs. Look at how
it curls! Look how it moves again. Feel
how light it is in the palm. Feel how
it tickles as it moves. Imagine
an awareness that new meeting a life form that old.
Can I be that new as I meet this infinite world?

Excerpt from Intention by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

2. Quote:

• “The danger itself fosters the rescuing power.” – Holderlin (quoted in Marie Howe’s “New and Selected Poems”)

3. Poem:

Islands by Muriel Rukeyser

O for God’s sake
they are connected
underneath

They look at each other
across the glittering sea
some keep a low profile

Some are cliffs
The bathers think
islands are separate like them

4. Something Inspiring:

This conversation between Krista Tippett and Robin Wall Kimmerer:

Tippett: Here’s something beautiful that you wrote in your book Gathering Moss, just as an example. “The rocks are beyond slow, beyond strong, and yet, yielding to a soft, green breath as powerful as a glacier, the mosses wearing away their surfaces grain by grain, bringing them slowly back to sand. There is an ancient conversation going on between mosses and rocks, poetry to be sure. About light and shadow and the drift of continents.” That’s so beautiful and so amazing to think about, to just read those sentences and think about that conversation, as you say.

Kimmerer: Yes, and it’s a conversation that takes place at a pace that we humans, especially we contemporary humans who are rushing about, we can’t even grasp the pace at which that conversation takes place. So thinking about plants as persons — indeed, thinking about rocks as persons — forces us to shed our idea of, the only pace that we live in is the human pace. And it’s, I think, very, very exciting to think about these ways of being, which happen on completely different scales, and so exciting to think about what we might learn from them.

5. Project updates:

My upcoming book “Manly: A Field Report” is a gathering of fragments, archetypes, contradictions, inherited scripts, breaks in the lineage, and moments of initiation, avoidance, accountability, failure, and tensions.

Here’s an excerpt from one of its essays:

Two more jumps.

That’s it.

That’s all the tylium, a necessary fuel for jumping, the fleet has in its non-stop retreat from the Cylons. Starbuck, the best fighter pilot in the fleet, is grounded by injury. It is up to Apollo to pull off the attack on the Cylon occupied tylium refinery. But Apollo knows. Everyone knows. He’s not as gifted in the cockpit as Starbuck. Unable to sleep, Apollo is in the hangar standing next to his Mark II Viper. The Viper he will fly into a nest of Cylons come morning. Commander Adama finds him. Tosses him a lighter. A good luck charm. A lighter passed down to him by his father. A father Adama admits was better at fathering than he was. They have a strained father-son relationship. A strain born of loss and absence. The halting repair of their relationship is one of the fundamental emotional arcs of Battlestar Galactica.

Apollo misreads the gesture.

“So, you’re worried too,” Apollo says with a bit of resentment.

“About what?” Adama asks.

“You know, sometimes it feels like the whole ship thinks, uh, Starbuck would do better.”

“I don’t.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“‘Cause you’re my son.” 

Apollo’s face nears tears.

And mine?

The face of the man watching Battlestar Galactica from start to finish for the fourth time, sitting on a couch next to his son, who is home for the summer, who is watching Battlestar Galactica for the first time, who works all day, who sits with me on the couch for one show a night after dinner, who joins me in talking about the show and our day during commercial breaks, the face of that man, who recognizes Apollo’s craving to be claimed, is also nearing tears.

I stare ahead. Do not want my son to know of my ache. I go quiet. Too scared to ask during the commercial break. Does he need to hear the same thing from me? Does he know that he is my son? That he is mine. My son. That he has been claimed.

I do not know. Because I do not know what being claimed feels like. I am not entirely sure what it is. How it works. Whether I’ve done it. Whether my son knows it’s been done.

I only know that it is needed…

Thanks so much. And, have a great day! – shawn