Four stream-of-consciousness things from the last few months:
Planning to jump the gap at Chimney Rock
So I’ve always been scared around ledges. There’s a little rock formation called Chimney Rock up in Catoctin Mountain Park where my family has hiked a million times. To get to the top of the formation with the best part of the view, you have to jump from a little ledge across a little chasm to the ledge on the other side. Chasm is too big a word. It’s a gap maybe fifteen feet deep but only a couple of feet wide, just big enough that to get across it takes a small leap rather than a big step. Basically you have to jump, but there’s no way an average person could jump and miss the other side unless they tripped or there was a badly-timed earthquake. I’ve never jumped. Kids do it all the time. The last time I was there I was 30 years old or something, and I stood at the edge for a long time and told myself in my head that this time I would do it, but I never did. I got angry with myself, but not angry enough to jump.
You can also go down and climb around the side a little bit and eventually you’ll get to a place where you can make it up the rock without jumping. I always do that. It’s much more controlled but I’m always a little ashamed and angry.
I know that to love someone and to be loved by someone is to jump.
***
Waiting for a mango gelati
I’m tired of the broken busyness and the frantic scurrying noise of the city and people and life. There was a woman in line for Rita’s Italian Ice last night with a kid who was watching SpongeBob on a phone. He was 10 probably, and the episode was loud enough that I heard everything SpongeBob said, all the jokes, but the kid never laughed and the woman didn’t even look at the kid and she was talking even more loudly on her own phone. I don’t want to judge her – God, forgive me for judging her, who am I? – but God, I want the world to be better.
I guess it’s mostly selfish. It’s horrible. If I’m really honest, I don’t particularly care whether the woman and her kid are healthy or if they love each other or if they know why trees are beautiful, but I get scared for all of us, mostly for myself. What will that kid, and all the millions and billions of kids like him, grow up to be? What will he do to the world? How can he love a person? The world for him is probably a pineapple under the sea behind the glass on a screen while he waits for a large mango gelati. We’re like tourists at a zoo, only we’re like animals behind the glass for other people, too. If the world is only there for our entertainment, I wonder how much longer it can be there at all.
***
Looking at the grass between the street and sidewalk
It’s easy to lose right perspective of Man, here in this place of sharp corners and square walls and pavement. There’s a thin slice of grass that the city left to grow between the sidewalk and the street. It’s not much. When you look at it you feel like the whole world is streets and sidewalks and the little green bits are the aberrations: that the grass is a thin roll of decorative tissue paper laid on top of a great box of underlying mechanism, or a false wooden finish put on a plastic table. In cities you can’t avoid the feeling that the heart of the world is industry.
But this is an illusion twisting things inside out. Think of the universe. Things are the other way around. All our new apartment complexes, all the humming data centers, all the lying electric scooters, all the pavement we’ve ever poured: It’s a small boat on the surface of awesome, awful, unfathomable depths. It’s a house of cards on a stretched blanket over the sleeping giant of Time, and one day the storm will come and the giant will wake and all we’ve built will be shaken apart like a leaf pile in a storm, will shrink and shrink and disappear like a let-go balloon. Underneath pavement isn’t more pavement. Underneath pavement is earth. Underneath earth is eternity.
***
Remembering not to be anxious
Do not worry about your life.
Look at the birds of the air.
There’s one, perched on the telephone wire.
A dove.
It coos, and the coos
Blend with the shrill wine of a mechanical saw
(They’re remodeling the house two doors down)
And the siren headed to or from the hospital
Three blocks away.
There is a small patch of grass growing beside the shed.
There is a trail of airplane exhaust dissolving in the sky
Where the sun has lifted all earth to itself.
There is always this great welling up of life
And anger
And joy.
Do not worry about your life.
Do not be anxious.
Even the rocks cry out.
