#359

God damn. It's 2024. Who the fuck are you now, dear reader? More to the wellspring, who in the fuck am I. Who have I become.

Since last I wrote, my younger brother and I traveled far north to the town where he has been living for the past year and a half, a place where the rocks are as old as any you will find anywhere along the face of this planet. More time with each other than we have been granted in many years. I have reached deep into the clear waters at the root of my hills and I have stood at their crown and looked down upon the leafless branches of my winter forests. I have learned and taught, perceived and been perceived, and long and rich were the miles and the processes of the days. 

Then, it was new year's fuckin eve, and all that goes with that at the family home, with the family dogs, and two triumphant and reasonably recentered yet exhausted men and their parents.

The important thing about my family, the big thing--every family has their Big Thing--is we talk a lot, about a lot of stuff, and we bring a lot of stuff into a lot of other stuff. I mean on top of reminiscing and basic logistics and comparative sensorium stuff, all manner of practicalities and daydreams, admonitions and rebuttals, jokes and quotations and fripperies, any and all of which can be embroidered and interwoven into each other and the following: we talk about world history, cinema, philosophy, bullshit, sex, morality, politics, books, science, sports, fitness, nutrition, art, food, race, religious and spiritual matters, drugs, I dunno, literally fuckin everything, if it occurs to us and we can find a way to express it we say it and either talk about it or fight about why we do or don't want to talk about it and table it and bring it up later and come at it from a different angle. We are not a family of prolonged silences or areas of discussion that stay closed for inviolable spans of time. We just say stuff and react to each other constantly. 

This information may or may not surprise you, dear reader, but it generally surprises friends and acquaintances who hear of it or witness it firsthand. I don't really say all that much, out there in the world, unless called upon--a question hanging in the air, a vacant space where somene needs to step up, when at last the fools and talkers have talked themselves out and I can speak, preferably with the concision--brutal or careful--which I exercise so rarely in this blog. Generally if I allow myself to talk too long, people start to get angry.

Of course, some friends have heard me talk and even ramble at length, and they are as such more familiar with the man as you know him, dear reader. 

*

Wow, that was so baring. I feel like I do this on occasion, pretty close to the new year--throw aside a cloak or a curtain to reveal a very personal little trinket or secret room in my fortress. You sly dog, you perfect, blank listener! How you draw me out into the open, on internet of all places!

Ah, well. Ting-a-ling.

*

May we find the wisdom and courage to avoid cruelty this year, if we can. May we not give in to its temptations and may we not suffer its trespasses. It will make an important difference.

--JL 

#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