On Being Human (some field notes)

1) I am in Georgia, in Memphis, in the Ozarks, the mountains, the city, an open field in Missouri, house under a thunderstorm, again, body under the rain, and I wonder: where am I? where am I? here? here? how do I make myself into a thing that's gathered?

2) It is morning, and later, the almost-summer air will be almost-sticky. Now, it is cool and expansive. An easy inhale-exhale branching wide. Aloof, drawn. Unsympathetic to the musings I find so critical. It will not speak to me, as if to say: Think all your well-thought thoughts now. Ask your good questions now. Be far-reaching now. Find some novelty while you can. Because by midday, I'll lay a shroud over your little world, and once again, your body will become a container. A humble gathering of all the unyielding familiarities of your life. Those tales it seems you came into this world carrying. Those words gone stale. That luck you can't shake. Permanence is relative, I tell you. In the easiness of morning, you might be able to convince yourself that, one day, you can do away with them. But let my heat remind you: those are the hums of your life. The steady heartbeat beneath the body. Let my heat remind you: once again and always, you can find yourself alone with the queries you've become so bored with. That remain uncompromisingly yours. Left always in the land where no novelty can save you. And then, then, the only good question becomes: painfully, again, how willing are you to be intimate?

3) Three times this month (why is it always three?), someone has told me how tired, how exhausted, how existentially bored they are of the cyclical happenings of their life. Of the lessons that are only slight iterations of each other. Of the questions that resurface year after year: twenty years over, thirty years over, fifty years over. That carcass dragged across the kitchen floor. That blood stain that won't come out. Right now, I'm living deep inside the body of that reluctance. Feeling, becoming. Standing silent at the crossroads between the experiences I say I want for myself and the ones that often feel like they have been assigned. Feeling, becoming the line between them until it all but dissipates.

4) The feltness of my humanity is curled deep inside the caves of those feelings I am most intimate with: what big-little worlds make it possible for us to be able to feel?

5) In a conversation with Alan:

Nicole: The weather can't decide what it wants to be today.
Alan: Yes, it can. It wants to be indecisive.

6) Perhaps part of the human experience is learning how to have it: here is the good question: do you know how to have your life?

7) If I'm being honest, I'm not sure happiness in my life would be enough.

8) Poet David Whyte said, "A well-felt sadness is equally generous."

9) Perhaps there is an intimate betrayal inside of being human: what we want and then the betrayal of it, happiness and its treason.

10) If I'm being honest, I'm not sure satisfaction would be enough. I think I hunt for something beyond it: the crossroads where satisfaction and its betrayal meet.

11) David Whyte's theory on why many people will not look life directly in the eye is because we are afraid of loss. The truth we can't outrun: one day, we will lose everyone we love, or one day, we will be lost to them.

12) I am afraid of loss. I've caught myself afraid of being here. There's a lawlessness to the present. Unlike my projected images of the past or fancied images of the future, here, there are no rules. No fate. No destiny. Just a mouth floating in black sky: breathing.

13) Happening Apart From What's Happening Around It, a poem by Jack Gilbert:

There is a vividness to eleven years of love
because it is over. A clarity to Greece now
that I live in Manhattan or New England.
If what is happening is part of what's going on
around what's occurring, it is impossible
to know what is truly happening. If love is
part of the passion, part of the fine food
or the villa on the Mediterranean, it is not
clear what the love is. When I was walking
in the mountains with the Japanese man and began
to hear the water, he said, "What is the sound
of the waterfall?" "Silence," he finally told me.
The stillness I did not notice until the sound
of water falling made apparent the silence I had
been hearing long before. I ask myself what
is the sound of women? What is the word for
that still thing I have hunted inside them
for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy,
the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still
in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper
down where a woman's heart is holding its breath,
where something very far away in that body
is becoming something we don't have a name for.

14) Here, in the present, there is no story yet. No tale to wrap my tail around. If I'm being honest, I don't know, and I can't: can I get okay with that? can I stomach the chaos?

15) The mouth of time owes me nothing. I am exhausted from holding my breath: waiting, leaving. Perhaps it is best to learn its rhythm. Perhaps being human means to open my own mouth and speak. Begin a conversation.

16) Begin a conversation:

One mouth: The human doesn't know where they are today.
Two: Yes, they do. Always, again, they are in unknown territory.

And what will I say to that?