-- and then sometimes you meet new people who seem to eat the world whole, rind and seeds and stem and all. part of it is the joyousness and/or calm deliberateness at which the person eats the fruit, full real bites taken, sitting on a rock looking out at the midpoint of a trail up a mountain, slow and deliberate and with full intensity, bites taken like steps, breathing out, looking straight horizontally out at the horizon and not at the ground or sky, for once.
if there's anything I am wholeheartedly proud of it is finding precious friends who are also all these people moving on their own accord; progressing, operating in large curved arcs that take them wherever they need to go. with surety and conviction that is not infallible or omniscient or 'goal-oriented' but just aligned around dotted-line paths of desire and introspective understanding, which I think is crucial and important and admirable. all of these things. friends whom, on a desert island, would still be pursuing the things they do. at rare moments like last night space-time curves around this group of friends with precious gravitational mass going southbound on the b44 bus, the fabric of the city bent around celestial bodies with whom you have sought and found linkages and have poured your brains and hearts out to in the form of mugs of tea, reading groups, emails, dinners, a hot toddy.
and so as such - no matter what any outcomes may be - it is nice to know (nice as in 'more-than-nice', as in 'sometimes absolutely crucial') to know of the presence of these rare people, moving and stepping deliberately, operating with conscious presence. not all of this has to have weighty gravitas of course, what is this really? it's like: every once in a while I'll walk down 9th ave and pass by the alvin ailey dance studio on 55th with its first floor glass walls, and catch a glimpse of rows of students jumping in union, and I become deeply appreciative for each jump and how deliberate it is, and how much (I imagine) it originates from self-directed desire and play and movement and exploration and practice, all simultaneously.
--
looking back over, sometime three years ago:
there was this moment on the train from irkutsk to ulaanbataar when I was so very happy, so very ecstatic and happy. the windows were down and in the dusky distance you could see faraway clouds raining on faraway mountains, and the sun was setting behind that, and the sky was clear and everything in the air was so fresh, with vague whiffs of engine smoke drifting in almost like stray strains of perfume, but the air itself smelled like green, green grass and the trees were waving by, everything blurred sideways like a gerhard richter painting. I was alone that night in a cabin all by myself, and I closed the door and turned off the light and opened my window and felt the wind brush in as I went to sleep. once in a while opposing trains would pass our train, which meant that suddenly the ongoing rhythm of the train would be broken by this thunderous cataclysmic roar, lights and sound and fury, and the cabin would light up in a scattered strobing mix of shadows and glints-off-of-metal, and the sound and light of it would be so so visceral, piercing my eyelids even when my eyes were closed. and then everything would be over, as soon as it had started.
and then if you went out into the dark hallway because you couldn't sleep, everyone else was also there, leaning out of the window, gazing into the distance, quieted into contemplation by the rocking motion of the train and the sudden change of landscape and the expanse of sky and the enormity of all the clouds. watching the sun set. I was so very content, so very content and happy just to be there, to be there and going somewhere. I would have been content had the train broken down and stopped; I would have been content had we been going faster. I was just content to be there, moving.