#12

II.

Habit becomes conviction, conviction becomes passion, and in passion, vocation becomes illuminated. Our vocations determine our paths; in this case, with hilarious literality.

The fastest I've ever walked a mile in a straight line is between seven and eight minutes, which is only a little slower than I can run one. The furthest I've ever walked in a day is somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty-five miles. The type of walking is important context--one can place different value per mile depending on city traversal, country miles, mixed terrain, footing, load, humidity, altitude, and depending on adverse conditions, which can place us in the five to fifteen mile range when reckoning my more hardcore walks. The coldest temperatures I have ever dealt with on a walk were about negative fourteen degrees Celsius with negative thirty on the wind chill. The hottest day I've walked was about forty degrees. 

The high temperature was in the desert, east of Qatar. The lowest was right here at home. In Massachusetts I "walked" up an eighty-five degree grade, and in the Andes and in the Porcupine Mountains I carefully slid sideways down a similar slopes. In jungle, desert, swamp, cloud forest, cliff country, scrub, cities, suburbs, steppes, strips, railroad tracks, in unknown towns and neighborhoods and hundreds of times along the same haunts and pounds and efficient courses. O, to achieve as many more of my artless, scruffy, meandering walks in as many strange and wonderful places as I have the luck and wherewithal to reach in my limited wandering upon this wide and sacred Earth! 

I've walked with about a dozen different CD players and iPods, wearing a heaping variety of earbuds and regular little plastic headphones and big heavy noise-canceling wraparounds, wearing many years worth of messenger bags and backpacks crammed full over a lifetime of lugging the most absurd crap and cruft and enough loose sheets of paper to fill the winds of hurricane. Dozens of shoes and boots have been walked to pieces. I've needlessly carried trumpets, tubas, bass guitars, bags of books, athletic duffels full of gear, folders full of papers or paperback books tucked under one arm, simply to avoid a ride and walk instead--with a busted knee, with broken ribs, with smashed toes, in spite of migraines, through colds, in frightening fog, soaking rain, incredible stenches, driving winds loaded with particulate or shrieking, dangerous levels of noise, through clouds of midges and plagues of mosquitoes and streaking insanities of black flies, through long grass and close brush, weaving through dense copses far from the beaten path and standing out alone against the sky on a naked ridge, splashing through a ford or tripping across a bridge or balancing along a log over a creek. Alone and in the company of a whole biography of ghosts, and alone.

Thoughts come to you from different angles, old ways blooming into new improbabilities and gleaming realizations plunging like stars into the depths of your own unsounded knowledge. The way opens you up to insights and ideas that one cannot acquire unless one is afoot and plunging ahead, mindful without mind of the breath in the lungs and the wind and the sky. The sight and sound of all the birds and beasts and human persons and all the other living things and the inorganic bedrock and constructed scaffolding, all the angles and vectors and trajectories and fractals; all the new avenues to understanding the world you all walk through together, transforming one another, day after day. And the highest of all, the loss of self, the pure forgetfulness, the being caught up in the undifferentiated glory of creation, the infinite God within breathing coeval with the infinite God without, all boundaries sundered, all veils parted.

You never remember, because memory can't hold it. You can't say what you learn, because it is something you know, and knew, and will always know, and this knowledge is held in kind with knowledge held in the hearts of every soul that ever lived, but it isn't anything words can compass or draw into the world of symbols, because it isn't singular knowledge and it isn't interchangeable, but infinite, immutable, and absolutely silent.

Whispers of it make it into the songs that well up inside you, if you're lucky. You try to put it into the way you hold the people you love, when you're lucky enough to hold them. Into the heart you love in common. The best of your prayers. 



--JL

#11

Eleven is my favorite number. Seven is my second favorite. Then, combinations of the two. It's very rewarding. You see these numbers a lot. My favorite letter is L. When was the last time I watched Sesame Street? I learned about Jim Henson's death from organ dysfunction the age of seven, seven years after the fact. Eleven years later, I turned eighteen, which I remember feeling extremely irrevocable. When the numbers are attached to fictional characters it feels very special, like in Halo and Stranger Things.

There's ads now, I think, on this blog. They're authorized for sure. Have you read my books? They can be found where the browser will take you after clicking upon this hypertext.

Here's a little stuff about things.

*

I.

Walking is something of a point with me. As a child I had some problems with my heart and lungs. One of the only competent doctors I have ever met thought they would be ameliorated and probably eliminated by getting me out of the hammocks, beds, and chairs I favored in my pursuit of quiet, eyes-and-brain-based activities and spend a few afternoons or mornings a week walking up mountains. 

I kind of resented this because I was very into spending all, every second, each available component and section of my free time reading. It's already amazing how much stuff takes time away from reading, so traipsing up and down a mountain didn't seem like a good investment to me. I only ever felt lukewarm about it. But my cardiopulmonary system worked itself out, right as rain.

When I got to middle school--leaving the age of eleven behind--my feelings underwent a transformation deeply colored by a full immersion into the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien. In advance of the Jackson films, which to me and to my best friend looked like the consummation of all human wishes in one glorious triad, I reread The Hobbit and gnawed my way through the rest of his works, cracking every bone I could grab to lick gratefully at the precious marrow. I repeat this process every year, happier than an earthworm in biodynamic compost. To me this is a sublime condition and the truest form of earthly joy.

I got into the habit of taking advantage of excuses to shoulder my backpack meaningfully and start walking the three miles from the school to my house. Only after school to head for home, and only on, say, half-days, or under exceptional weather conditions, at first, as I felt safer riding the bus, which was also faster. I always carried as many books as my backpack would hold, and tried my best to maintain good posture with it always--as dwarves make light of burdens. 

Habit forms itself, sometimes. Almost against my will I would seize opportunities to walk the long way, to refuse rides and instead find out how long it would take to walk home from the movie theater, or the other high school, or the downtown haunts, or the Chinese place where I got my first real taxable job. Before that I was a paperboy, a job which allowed for a good deal of walking, but I lost this gig to a forty-year old dad when the Great Recession started to really pinch.

Walking home from parties, from the arcade, from the park, from the library, from wherever I had walked to or been driven to. During snowstorms, on days when the streets were mottled, inch-thick ice and the icicles hung hung four feet long all along the power lines and snapped great branches from strong trees. Three-inch crust over the three feet of wet packing snow where the blowers don't churn and spit. On days when old folks don't leave their house and the parents only let their kids out for a half hour before they have to come in from a break 'cause the heat's so pure and fierce a dog might go insane and leap at a dumpster so hard it leaves big smears of tacky blood on it. At two forty-five in the morning, full of beer and singing aloud. From a little after sunup to a couple hours after sunset, and barely able to walk at all the next day, using my hands as much as my feet on the stairs. 

I remember this guy I went to school with rolling up in his mom's minivan one evening when I was walking home after wrestling practice. The snow and sleet were falling so thick you had to wipe a crust off your forehead and eyebrows and soaking, crusted eyelids and frozen eyelashes and the feet slid in long runnels of gray puddly slush and gave back ground on slick patches of stubborn freeze under the liquefaction. He rolled up and offered me shelter in his warm dry van and I told him, through a face gone numb and clumsy with chilled blood, no, I'm good, you're good, I'm almost home. I remember the look on his face as he nodded a little, his mouth a little open, a tiny little frown. He didn't look away from me as he pulled off, his eyes not hurt, not confused exactly, but uncomprehending, not processing. And over time I have found that people do not actually believe me, and think that I am lying, when I say how much I prefer to walk, when I describe how much I walk, under what conditions.

*

Tomorrow, more on this subject, which shall settle it for a long time coming.


--JL