August 1

In a curious dream that seemed to span the night entire I stood upon a footbridge with my sister-in-law Dawn (glad I explained who she was to you five who know her already) & between her questions & my answers we covered the entirety of my relationship of the last seven years. Our mission, it seemed, was to walk through it step by step & gauge each moment’s emotional resonance; how it was in recollection, how it must have been at the moment of its cresting passage, how it has transmuted as hostage to time & circumstance. & small details that I do not daily recall—house-sitting a week here in Santa Fe, standing upon some bluff in eastern Utah surveying the riverbed beneath. I awakened stunned, first at how comprehensive it was, & second at how simple a suggestion it offers. Too often I am finding the mineral core of things obscurely adumbrated by fluctuating phenomenal presentation. The riverbed beneath the river, & how swiftly our eye steals away upon the rippling tide to forsake what urges it this way or the other. How one can approach what one loves either with equal love or with the swirling attendant emotions that constellate it & presume some overlaying form—the hurt in us, or the confusion of endless yawning miles, or the angers that surge & subside. Here a sinuous sudden bend, there a slack pool behind a boulder, & further still the flushing whitewater of the rapids. & beneath each & all, the foundation rests in a relative fixity. We alter the current in earnest when we reach below & contact the riverbed. Cleaving through the vicissitudes of mere dailiness, in all of their thinly dissembled costume. How gravely the unconscious day can pass. How the untended field lays fecund yet for flora strange to the eye. Not that this constant handling seems solution—but that we must balance our wilderness & our cultivation in equal measure when attending the heart. & simply. & ever simply in our soundings.

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