“You’ll see how much your little bird has changed.” — Edith Piaf

Tags

art, Edith Piaf, French, high school, Jacques Prevert, memoir, philosophy, teachers, Virginia Woolf

Not much taller than the desks, she stood unblinking in front of the students, hopping and gesticulating wildly to convey her lesson to her jaded audience. In this of her many dramatic monologues with occasional spittle, she introduced a new topic, rudiment to understanding French, and maybe even life: existentialism.

We thoroughly read Camus, en français, and over time she espoused to her sheltered and callow high school students that every choice one makes has a consequence, and the absurd man is one who acts out of habit, shirking responsibility and awareness for the events and choices that come to comprise one’s life. We listened to Edith Piaf, learning her lyrics by heart. Having heard no other voice so utterly pained, wretched even, but strong and moving, I was taken. She grabbed me at the end of class after the rest of the students had drained out of the room, and for whatever reason, recounted that during her first teaching job at an elementary school, an air force officer entered her classroom and in front of her 25 students, handed her an envelope. In it was a piece of paper describing in the most coldly succinct language that her husband’s plane had crashed on a training flight nearby and he was deceased. There also in the envelope was his metal wristwatch, the only personal item with him and recovered from the crash, cracked with hands frozen at the exact moment of his death. With a teacher’s salary and two young children, she said Edith Piaf’s tragic life and inextricably-linked music became anthem to the fact she had no other choice to move on.

Her philosophy must have been a double-edged sword for the ESL students also under her care at the high school — the dregs, the few brown and black kids bussed into an otherwise privileged school of white kids dropped off by luxury cars. But there was no less, if not more, passion for these kids as there was for her sniveling French students. When her Edith Piaf admirer became Senior Class President, she arranged a secret meeting, knowing my duties as student organizer of the school prom. She said she had a young couple in her ESL class who wanted to go to the prom but could not pay the price of ticket, exorbitant even for today’s standards. She wanted to broker an arrangement for them, and they must never know. Loyal to her, I offered to comp them in, no one would notice in the shabby accounting. Slightly offended, she interjected to say the boyfriend had agreed to work the coat check before and after the dance to earn his way. I added their names to the paid list and other than her catching my eye at the entryway of the dance hall while she stood next to her couple, there was no word of it after.

She also introduced us to a book of poetry by Jacques Prevert, someone also familiar with war and loss. She had to have known I never returned my copy back to the school repository, and from time to time I still find a guilty joy in reading a poem or two from it — a treasured contraband. It was, of course, easy to tell her I was coming out as gay. She might have even said she had some gay friends or a gay son, I don’t remember. But after that, she took to meeting me at the town’s bookstore cafe, and we sat together as an unlikely duo of a middle-aged, manically energetic, short woman, and a gangly, wide-eyed, attentive girl — my hair getting shorter by the week as my shoes grew more militant. I don’t remember much of what we talked about, but I can smell the bitter coffee-filled air, and see the tome of pages from Antigone she xeroxed in French (another petty crime) and brought me to read over the summer. It was also there that she asked me to be President of the school French Club. I had no duties except to bring a piece of brie to the school club fair, where she also hosted an escargot-eating contest, and in turn it was something to add to my padded Stanford-bound resume. When our senior yearbook came out weeks before the end of school, she curiously asked to hold mine for a day or so. When she returned it to me, there adhered strongly to the inside the front page was an engraved, stately metal plaque. It read my name, the title of French Club President, and underneath, “Honni soit, qui mal y pense.” An ancient motto of chivalry, it means something to the effect of, evil to those who think evil, or shame to those who think shame of it.

The last week of school, she made me promise that I would let her be the last teacher I would say goodbye to. So, after gathering my things and finishing some tearful thank you’s to a few of my other teachers, I found her waiting for me in her classroom. As we walked down the hallway to one of the school’s exits out to the parking lot, she explained to me that there at the doorway was a threshold and it was marked by a strip of metal. She said that it was a milestone, a marker, this line. She would go on the other side and she was going to watch me cross. So I did: I unceremoniously stepped over the line, tears welling in my eyes, and there on the outside of the school she jumped to hug me. As she grasped me in her embrace she whispered in my ear, though it seemed louder and permanent: You have crossed the line and you must go, and I want you to remember, she clenched more tightly, you can’t go back.

(An image from an art performance I did with Jesse Schmidt, 2008)

“I wish that once & for all I could put down in this wretched handwriting how this country impresses me — how great I feel the stony-hard flatness & monotony of the plain. Every time I write in this book I find myself drifting into the attractive but impossible task of describing the Fens — till I grow heartily sick of so much feeble word painting; & long for one expressive quotation that should signify in its solitary compass all the glories of earth air & Heaven. Nevertheless I own it is a joy to me to be set down with such a vast never ending picture to reproduce — reproduction is out of the question — but to gaze at, nibble at & scratch at.

After all we are a world of imitations; all the Arts that is to say imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see. Such is the eternal instinct in the human beast, to try & reproduce something of that majesty in paint marble or ink. Somehow ink tonight seems to me the least effectual method of all — & music the nearest to truth.” –Virginia Woolf

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said.” — Wittgenstein

Tags

art, Being, dead birds, memoir, painting, philosophy, silence, susan Sontag, Wittgenstein

In the yard of my childhood home, a robin drunk from devouring over-ripe cherries on our tree, flew into our bay window that must have held an attractive illusory world, so much so that more than a few birds met that hard, bludgeoning reality. And after struggling for air on the ground below, it became still and lifeless. My mother, sensitive to the meekest of life forms, gathered the corpse and her two fledgling daughters for a funeral. A hole was dug, and as I watched the corpse of the bird descend into the dirt void, my mom said words, words of ritual, wishing that this bird would be in peace.

That robin’s life, unlike the other carcasses of animals on roadsides or worse, was made sacred to me, and the abyss into which some part of this bird, the part besides feathers and flesh, inhabited when it was into the ground became the eternal question mark.

My mentor describes the pre-classical Chinese pictogram of sacred as a person standing on earth, on one’s toes, reaching for the sky, the heavens. The sacred cannot be without the earth, the mundane requirements of being human, but it also has the urge for beyond such knowing.

Eventually and logically, that became the case for those beings lying unceremoniously in rotting ditches who by my eyes were not made sacred. And a moment of heightened attention in a car passing by was, and continues to be, my attempt to sacralize, because it feels necessary that we would all be given the mere gift of attention as we disappear.

Finally this week, it was this scene that appeared to me in my own ritualized space of art-making in my studio, where I stared upon the flocks of quiet, often dissolving, single, little dead birds I’ve painted over and over for the last 7 years. After enduring the dissonant if not polite questioning and dismissal from others and myself — amidst a cultural popularization of cute birds on every sundry item available (“put a bird on it”) — I was partially decoded.

And luckily, also this week, I read an essay by Susan Sontag, who fully understands the impulse to make art “towards the ever-receding horizon of silence.”:

“One result is a type of art which many people characterize pejoratively as dumb, depressed, acquiescent, cold. But these privative qualities exist in a context of the artist’s objective intention, which is always discernible. To cultivate the metaphoric silence that’s suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much of Pop Art) and to construct “minimal” forms which seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices.”

(My painting: “Bird Elegy #1″ (detail), 2012.  14″ x 19” Watercolor on Paper)

But my recent writing/searching has drawn my attention to the fact that all things, especially the experience of love, are of a continual parting. Perhaps that impossible constant attention to that coming and going, the making sacred of every moment and every thing that makes a heartbeat, that presences and reaches into us, and then dissolves into silence — Heidegger’s clearing and gathering and clearing — that is a  glimpse into the untranslatable state of Being.

For now, I can only handle my little birds.

“It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one’s assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all.” Susan Sontag

And when we imagine wings that come and go / What we see is a house / And a wide open window. – May Sarton

Tags

Bachelard, birdsong, childhood home, dead sparrow, Gadamer, Heidegger, Home, May Sarton, memoir, music

If Goethe is right, and architecture is frozen music, home is a song we have learned by heart.

My friend reminds me that learning things by heart insists upon rhythm, the heartbeat, and that the experience of the present moment is rhythmic.

One beat has to end for the next to begin. And like his favorite piano concerto, we don’t know when this note ends, and there is much tension in the space before the next. And life is marked by a gentle sadness when that moment ends and dissolves into the next moment. That, according to Bugbee, life is haunted by a continual parting. Proust says these moments are connected to places that also don’t exist anymore: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues, are as fugitive, alas as the years.”

And that was the fugitive feeling I have had recently. First, I was at a dinner where a friend made a lovingly-prepared pot roast. Tomato and herbs infused a slow-cooked meat I’ve not experienced since I was living in my childhood home. The warm, familiar smell wrapped its arms around me as I sat in this modern-day apartment, just as my mother’s filled our evening home when I was a child. The smell invoked something so palpably nostalgic that one part of my self remained in a distant past even as I carried about in the present-tense conviviality. My friend sitting next to me also was piqued by the memories of childhood dinners; someone who I happened to have first met when I was 6 years old. We have witnessed each other grow and shed several versions of ourselves, though there is something from which we struggle not to stray.

It recalls Gadamer’s notion of festival — that there is an enduring in the perishing. There is continually a moment that we wish could be retained, held onto for just another moment longer, even though it can never be. It is a “consciousness of human frailty,” when we are aware of the rhythms of our life and the fact that they end. “Every festive joy, yes, every joy, is perhaps the other side of an inexpressible, unutterable.” And every beat of the heart is inseparable from its opposite — silence; nothingness.

And then I gave into the urge to drive by my childhood home this week. I was in the area, where a chaparral dustiness meets the crisp coastal breeze and tugs at me. As did the autumnally-filtered light of a sun beginning to arc lower in the sky. And there predictably sat the home on the corner of middle-suburbia covered with mature trees and gridded off by narrow streets. The house, like the area, is shinier and more regal than the more humble and equitable times known before Silicon Valley bubbles and exorbitant housing prices. The home was still incredibly intimate, yet completely estranged from me — the current occupants undoubtedly using it in their own way in a sort of betrayal of the past. Because, like everything else, my home had to give way to their home. Like the tightly woven, straw nest that fell off the side of our house a few months ago. Next to it was a darkly stippled egg, intact, but belonging now to the unknown.

The nest fell from the eaves of my new home of the last 13 years. Soon, as with every year, the winter flock of Golden-crowned Sparrows and their one loyal Fox Sparrow friend returns to our feeder. One year our cat in her boredom slaughtered the Fox Sparrow, and after I grieved its dark, hopeless body in my hand, I decided not to slaughter the cat. A few years later, a new Fox Sparrow somehow rejoined the flock. I’ll never know how.

Fox Sparrow song

This is the home which presses itself into my son whose foundational memories will be part of the architecture, as the architecture is part of his psyche. And eventually, the most eventual fact of all, my life will give way also. So dramatic-sounding, I know, but the remembrance of which always relates to Heidegger’s astonishment that I exist rather than not, that leads to Hamill’s loving a little bit more, because one of us will die. And the moment when the stars begin to burn through Mary Oliver’s sheets of clouds so that I may write about it here, with words that are little houses, as they dissolve away also. That things come and go, it brings about wonder:

“Celebration … is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder — the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this. – Martin Heidegger, Polt

“Art is not for.” Sam Hamill about Morris Graves

Tags

George Kahumoku Jr., Hawaii, Hi'ilawe, memoir, nature, poetry, Sam Hamill, slack key guitar

Tonight, the poor bloke handsomely dressed in traditional Hawaiian cloth and lei, as it is every night, blows a conch to the delight of the hotel guests and their cameras and then runs with his burning torch from tiki lamp to tiki lamp across the expansive plantation style grounds. My incredulous son and other children giddily in tow. Every night it has been a new person, always Hawaiian though, and some are more obliging in this cultural fetish performance than others. But each one has warmly facilitated my son in lighting at least two tikis (because he demands more than one), bless their hearts.

Stunning is the island landscape, illuminated by torchlight flickering in the tradewinds.

Such are the moments of artistry in Hawaii, never untangled from its colonial past and its current economic conundrum as tourist industry.

In any given hotel and restaurant catering to this particular area, there is almost certainly to be incredibly talented live musicians, plucking away at a slack key guitar, soulfully singing the Hawaiian traditional opus, mostly written to keep names of places, plants, fishes, birds and cultural knowledge — a dying language — alive.

(Kalopa State Park, nature preserve)

I was already bruised after just hearing the wistful “Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahalu’u,” (with love for my home Kahalu’u). Kahalu’u is a gorgeous beach almost smothered by concrete hotels and hordes of sunscreened waders, food trucks, and signs saying please do not step on the coral, please do not feed the fish. Even as I am counted among the island’s outsiders, I stopped to listen to these two men sing delicately and lovingly their version of ku’u home. Who isn’t bereaved of changes to the land?  They sang this elegy in an empty restaurant, empty besides a handful of waiters chatting amongst themselves, one sunburned couple watching basketball on the bar TV, and sentimental me in my bathing suit waiting for my to-go order.

Later when I entered the lobby of our hotel, where I’ve been annoyed by the constant presence of people since we arrived, a pang of a familiar melody filled me as it filled the architecture. The lobby lanai, full of well-dressed, shiny guests enjoying a cocktail and chatting amongst themselves, frames a view across the ocean where a faint silhouette of Maui dissolves into cloud. But what made me stop was yet again, another vulnerably sincere, Hawaiian slack key performer there in the skyline. He was playing not for the sake of the distracted guests unaware that this particular song, Hi’ilawe, extolls a site they probably snapped a photo of today; not for what is probably a paltry salary; and not for me mouthing what words I knew in appreciation for his performance, for the artful moment.

I hid in the adjacent stairwell hearing the last bits of the song until he transitioned to his next (I imagine to avoid the awkward silence between songs), and then I exited underneath the patio out to the courtyard. As I walked away, the musician ignored his audience as they ignored him and turned out over the balcony, looking for me below. I looked up at him and put my hand on my heart. As he strummed out the beginning of his next song, he smiled knowingly and nodded his head — a private, unseen gesture in a place of all places to be seen. Our eyes were on Hi’ilawe — an artful moment because it was completely gratuitous.

Hi’ilawe

George Kahumoku Jr.’s version of the song on YouTube, and its hula:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8kpNAIBRIw

Translation:

All eyes are on Hi’ilawe
In the sparkling lowlands of Maukele.

I escape all the birds
Chattering everywhere in Waipiʻo.

I am not caught
For I am the mist of the mountains.

I am the darling (a toy) of the parents
And a lei for the necks of grandparents.

The fragrance is wafted from Puna
And lives at Hi’ilawe waterfall.

Tell the refrain
All eyes are on Hi’ilawe.

“We are creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known.” George Steiner

Tags

George Steiner, Hawaii, history, Kealekekua Bay, Manini Beach, memoir, nature, post-colonialism, Wordworth

A kitchen oven structure, a plastic outlet plate, and other remnants of a home are a haunting sight on the bottom of the ocean floor of Kealakekua Bay. Ke ala ke kua, the pathway to God. The wreckage lies off the shore of Manini Kapahukapu beach, a sacred gathering place for ancient Hawaiians. They deemed the site a place of healing, and it seems since time immemorial this place has been in need of healing.

Hard to find, the beach’s grassy flat is surrounded by lush foliage, and its ocean shore is crusted over with almost black, unforgivingly sharp lava rock. Across the calm bay, an odd white, stone beacon of a monument commemorates Captain Cook, who landed at this Hawaiian village amicably at first. But after the entanglements of disease and colonial politics and cultural misunderstandings, he was murdered at that spot, in plain sight across from Manini.

Of course it is odd that there is no monument there to honor the dead Hawaiians that once occupied the present day ghost village and Heiau, now overgrown by bird-filled plants and trees, the true natives of the area. Besides the monument and a plaque now in the tide waters of a rising ocean stating, “Near this spot Captain Cook met his death,” there are only loads of snorkelers by boat and kayak swimming among luminescent coral forests. The reef is growing less and less pristine, inversely to its popularity. On an unmarked spot there in the turbidity of ocean water lurks one of our wedding rings, a frightful loss at first, but now a fitting, romantic homage.

Behind Manini lies a lava field, now filled with a rural grouping of homes, the impoverished ones belonging to native Hawaiians, the gentrified ones belonging to outsiders who either own them as rentals to outsiders, or who visit there just as transiently as would-be renters. I can’t help but want one myself. But that area feels heavy, and when figuring out why, I learned that before there were homes there, the lava field was the site of historical bloodshed. A faction of Hawaiians hoping to gain control over all the islands overpowered a group supporting the disinherited. The Battle of Mokuahai, in 1781, was savage as even women took up arms for their territory and were among the losers, killed by bludgeoning instruments, or forced over cliffs into the lava strewn ocean.

In the center of the bay, a large pod of spinner dolphins rest, swimming easy circuits with their calves. One year we swam out to them. They, being the more fit for sea, and either cautious or curious, found us first. I dove into the depths of the bay as a group passed me, and for the length of a held breath I swam with them, tears filling my swim mask, my hand holding my heart hurting for the beauty still left in pockets of this contested earth. But after a little research, my heart hurt more to know that my presence was detrimental to their rest, to their impending survival outside the bay where they are forced to return earlier than necessary because of swimmers like me, wanting to experience their glory.

Today, I stayed at Manini, and resisted the coral reef at the monument, and the pod of dolphins splashing and spinning on the other side of the Bay. And there is where I found the modern day ruins of a shipwrecked home, dragged into the sea by the reach of a tsunami that just over a year ago, swept tens of thousands of people in Japan out to sea. The same grandmother working there three years ago with her infant grandson, already adept at the ocean, my son then only a shrimp in my belly, was also there today as she is everyday under her umbrella. Folks stop by regularly to hear of what news, I’m not sure. While our sprouted kids played in Manini’s one sandy opening to the surf, she explained to me the recovery taking place in the area. In the eddy where pristine waters meet the machinations of savage American imperialism and colonialism, I hope Manini prevails for all of us.

Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
— Williams Wordsworth

“…those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Albert Camus

Tags

Absurdity, Annette Messenger, art, birthing story, Camus, eagles, Kierkegaard, memoir, philosophy

It was clear to everyone at the hospital I was a mess. Because of indescribable back pain, I received an epidural before I was dilated past a centimeter, and therefore my labor progressed at a crippled and wayward snail’s pace. Sometime through the night, I began to shake uncontrollably and a wave of general anxiety overcame me, which I attributed to the drugs; but the nurse on duty said it was mental. The next day, my friends and family took turns rubbing my legs because after a day on an epidural my lower half felt irritatingly restless and paralyzed at the same time. One of the labor and delivery nurses struck up conversation with me, probably because she saw I was floundering. The more we talked, the more my labor picked up, and my dilation progressed.  She seemed to recognize this, too, and felt a sense of ownership over her “project.” It began as chit chat, but at some point it became, as my friends kidded, unsurprisingly philosophical. And I don’t remember how, but it turned to Kierkegaard, as I blurted out to the nurse that during my pregnancy I had struggled with faith — a faith that everything in my pregnancy would be ok. I don’t remember exactly what she said, but she said something exactly wise, and it implored my confession of a previous  miscarriage – and that I would never know why it happened. That unanswerability undermined my willingness to “leap to faith,” even though I knew my faith, or lack thereof, had no bearing on how the Fates would knit together the outcome of my current pregnancy. Something so utterly close to me so as to be part of me, indeed sharing my blood, was outside of my control. This realization seared me like the pain that both rends and joins, and the nurse feeling her own limits looked out the window as I wiped a tear away. But she came back from her momentary distance and said, I bet you just reached the transition stage of labor – every woman I know has a revelation when she reaches the utmost extent of dilation. Exertion.

—

Over this past weekend in a light conversation with my studio mate, I threw around the word absurd to describe similar artworks from two artists, both who crochet and knit onto their treasured but precarious subjects. After hearing my studio mate’s response that she liked absurdity in art, I realized, despite my sophomoric passion for philosophy, that I was using the word unnecessarily in a negative way.

(Annette Messenger, “Les Repos de Pensionnaires,” aka “The Boarders.” 1971-72)

Both Camus and Kierkegaard philosophize about the absurdity that every human being faces – that we sense our life has some significance, some meaning; but as Camus put it, we are met with a cold, uncaring universe. We are saddled with the paradox that we are called to care with all of our might for the most vulnerable amongst us (especially ourselves) — yet we have in the end a limited bearing on what becomes of our fledglings.  (And somehow an acceptance of this allows our circle of caring to expand.)

Yesterday my mother, my son and I reach the spot where from across my hometown reservoir, we could see the faint outline of a large, dark bird with a tell-tale, beacon of a white head and tail, perched on a dead pine. Nearby, we could barely make out a nest occupied by his mate, mid-story in a moss-laden pine.  But the small smudge in our binoculars amounted to an extraordinary image in our minds. Thought never to emerge from the point of decimation by DDT, it is a nesting pair of bald eagles — the first in the Bay Area in 100 years.  We joined a small group of other enthusiasts, all sharing an inexplicably warm communion as witnesses to this scene. Somehow we are the faithful because we know doubt, tragedy even. And it makes these little glimpses like this, of heart-warming good in the world, seem precious in this painfully but poetically absurd world.

Today’s Advice: “[D]oubt is conquered by faith, just as it is faith which has brought doubt into the world.” Kierkegaard

Today’s Issue: “Do not count on death — on your own or on universal death — to found anything whatsoever, even the reality of this death. For it is so uncertain that it always fades away ahead of time, and with it, whatever declares it.” — Maurice Blanchot

Tags

Blanchot, Francesca Woodman, Heidegger, memoir, Mortality, Photography

A friend treated me to the MOMA exhibit of Francesca Woodman’s photography today. Her photographs are emotionally grueling as much as they are poetic and otherworldly — a startling oeuvre for an artist who killed herself at 22 years-old. Amid her reckless vulnerability, guileless experimentation and the prescience of her deadened gaze, it’s hard not to notice clues of a yearned-for redemption. Therein her photographs lies an openness to the other that occurs in a blinding blast of exterior light, a haze of translucent corporeal form as it moves during long exposure, and the compositional beauty of shapes in a beauty-less squalor. When I encountered the images which captured her in a morbid dance with her dead grandmother’s belongings, I heard instantly the song echoing in my own heart: my own missing grandmother.

My grandmother and I saw each other completely and despite this, loved each other wholly. It also helped that she spoiled me unabatedly, but that’s the providence of a grandmother. She has been dead almost 15 years, but her absence is as fresh as it was the moment her eyes beseeched mine in her final suffering — the moment I abandoned her, glancing away in my callow inability to reckon the totality of loss.

She bore only one son, who bore only two daughters — and the Lee lineage, with now dead branches of ancestors from roots undoubtedly in antiquity, is a felled tree. Yet she loved her grandaughters not just all the same, but perhaps even more so because of her own experience as a female in an overvalorized patriarchal prison of a culture.

Two years ago I bore a son, who, because of circumstances way outside my grandmother’s understanding, will carry the Lee name.

A year ago, I was putting my then 7 month-old son to bed. When I entered the bedroom, a portrait of my grandmother caught my attention in a way that doesn’t occur with belongings one lives with for years, photos and mementos that over time become as invisible as they are fixture. But on this night, her photo struck me as having a new punctum, that this old image existed suddenly in the present tense — a realization that my grandmother had been of life, incredibly overwhelming the sum of the lifeless ink and paper that represented her as such.

As quickly as that photo caught eyes with mine, I put it aside, and put my son to bed. As he fell asleep, a shadow whisked down the hallway outside. I assumed it was my partner, and when it was clear that it wasn’t, a primitive fear prevented any deep consideration and propelled me out of the bedroom and upstairs like a child fugitive of the dark.

When a rationality returned, I returned to check on my sleeping boy, and when I drew near him, I took in a startling sight — a security blanket had been tucked under my son’s chin, his arm embracing it, with the blankets wrapping him in the way I had left them. Incredulous, I sought my partner for what would be an easy explanation: Did you cuddle his security blanket under his arms?

What are you talking about, I’ve been up here the whole time.

When I showed her the sight of our son, somehow having found his “lovie” left nowhere near his sleeping body, tucked in his arms like only a loving guardian would do, a shockwave of love and gratitude for my grandmother flooded in, just as an equally terrifying openness to the utter unknown seized me — the magnitude of an untranslatability — which would never let me speak of it again.

Today’s Advice:  “And yet – beyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is an other that occurs. In the midst of beings as a whole, there is an open place. There is a clearing, a lighting… This open center, therefore, is not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.” — Heidegger.