Stealing away from the hotel lobby, I told him to take me to the central shrine. I looked across at my driver. His hand was on his heart, his eyes pink with tears. He fled the country years ago only to sneak back in for the festival. Nothing I thought I knew had prepared me for this. Unemployed mullahs crowding the street. Madness, the human swell, exalting. And then there was the fog in Varanasi. The beggars, the bodies committed to the holy waters, exalting. Don’t run away from this. The city of death is the city of joy. This is paradise. This is what we have to work with. We must live into the riddle of how to find joy in this uncertainty. Now here we are talking across the waters. An introduction to the half-known world and the half-known life. A call to cherish everything. You begin knowing and end up not knowing at all.

Found poem based on Pico Iyer’s interview with Tricycle about his new book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise.

Go to that place where all the world is felt. In the cavern of the body, a subsonic tremor, reverberating. There’s a kind of forever that goes backwards and forwards at once. Timeless time. Practice collapsing time. What is it that holds you together, breathes you, dreams you, stories you? An ongoing folding and unfolding, pulsation, a long hum in your throat, a rattling around in your chest. An unending process of the galaxy, a cosmic happening. The chorus of spring peepers, the swarming of ants, the swirling of minnows in the pond. The fantasy of independence, abandoned. Don’t shrink away from what yearning asks of you. The doors of the cage are open. They have been open all along.

Soft attention. The whole body, listening. Aliveness, long streams of breath. I just try to keep expanding the space inside where I can be in this place, in this vital, ordinary, passing instant, more fully. The clock is running, so I do what I can to show up before it’s all over. This is the urgency that claims me now— there is no time to rush.

borderlands

Since the beginning of confinement three months ago I’ve taken enormous pleasure in walking around my neighborhood and staring through the fences and gates at the gardens, parks, alleys, and monuments on the other side. Standing at the edge of a place long enough, the edge becomes a land itself. A liminal space at once both empty and full of everything, both deserted and fertile. There’s a radical silence there at the border. One that, if you enter into it deeply enough, inspires a search for new questions and a new way of inhabiting. A way that involves more humility, more reverence, more witnessing.

A man in a denim shirt with a half-smoked cigarette hanging from his lips walked over and stared with me into the chirping vines tangled around the bars of a fence near my building. “I bet they’re all laughing at us now.” I half-smiled, and together we watched the birds fly freely back and forth over the iron bars to the neighboring branches.

We’ve all been straddling this space ensemble, abiding in the shared experience of inwardness and of not-knowing, exploring these borderlands and peering through our distances at people and places we can no longer touch, at Spring awakening, at things coming alive and at things falling apart. These are territories of both restriction and freedom, eagerness and patience, of longing, surprise, delight, imagination, fantasy, of separation and togetherness. In the quietness of our lingering, they invite us to bow down and yield to that great force of life moving through us and all around us. A force we often can’t feel or sense below the busyness, distraction, and compulsive patterns of our daily activities. It’s in these strange lands, in that holy seed-space of Not-Anymore and Not-Yet, that I’ve asked: What stories and possibilities exist beyond these borders? What is growing here? What is dying and what is being birthed? What still wants to be lived?

Some mornings I run to Parc Buttes-Chaumont a few miles from my apartment and jog around the fence that encloses it. I go to smell the trees and to imagine rolling on the grassy hills again like I did last summer. Not long after moving to the city I noticed a feeling of being displaced when my body can’t rest under a tree. A feeling that now, as all of the trees I usually go to rest under are locked behind the city gates, invites bigger, more essential questions: Where is home? Where do we go to be welcomed back to our larger, unconfined selves? Where do we build sanctuaries when all of our usual ones are no longer available to us?

These spaces only ever really return us to the true sanctuary of our listening, our observing, and our embodied participation with all that’s around us. Falling back into that deep silence, we can always rest, wherever we are. It’s here in this still, sacred space behind all of the outer movement, between all of the stories and certainties about the past and the future, between all that we’ve known and all that we can’t know— here at these borderlands— where we can rediscover our belonging to the momentariness of everything.