Forty three years old . . . I love the odd numbered years, odd numbers of all sorts, and also winter. Following the dogs through the woods stopping now and then (here and there) to listen to the brook or stare at the stars through gaps between trees. Wanted to write “there is no other life” without feeling sappy or like just copping Blythe translating Basho. Better sometimes to walk without a notebook, or let go entirely of this need to communicate.

Yet what joy there is out there, in the quiet and solitude, and how gentleness expands with the desire to share. Conflict floats away and the mind does indeed step easily outside the body, going just ahead or off to the side. Very little is required. Came home to pray and drink coffee before writing and remembered the morning Henry Dassati showed me a prism in second grade. I held it to the light and the sudden brilliance burned a trail through my brain I have never stopped walking. “I am the light of the world,” etc. etc.

And what joy – and light – there is here, too – writing at my basement desk, cold but smiling, wondering when the mice will commence their games on the cement lip of the foundation. Or perhaps they’re already asleep. What lives they lead, fixed with an intensity I can barely imagine let alone contain. The snow sparkled so bright and blue where the single streetlight touched it I wanted to stop and stand forever in admiration, but you have to be in motion for the full effect. Later I paused on the stairs to savor the quiet and an 18-wheeler went by on 112, roaring in the night.

And recall just now teetering on the old bridge, staring into the black water of the brook where I thought I saw the reflections of stars. But the harder I looked, the darker the water got, and whatever streaks of light I saw seemed made-up, false credentials for the mystically-inclined. Spiritual aggrandizement ever the risk of one who seeks to teach. What did L.C. say last night? “I lost the way – I forgot to ask for directions.”

The pattern of my dreams throwing me these days. Revisiting the site of old dreams albeit with a new narrative and so waking with a sense that other worlds actually exist and the I that dreams visits them and so of course have to wonder, Is this life too a dream? Even writing it out like that leaves me a little nauseated, like standing on a boat rocked by waves. How do we hold our balance when our minds contain the universe?

Or something like that. Dan used to quote that old Zen story about the monk who dreams he’s a butterfly and wakes up unsure if he’s a monk or a butterfly dreaming he’s a monk. I guess we have to be some sort of beast. This beast – in this world – is short of eggs, the chickens hunkering down in winter barrenness and offering nothing, and the “pale, tepid imitations” of the grocer hardly a fit replacement. The kids and I looking at our toast and thinking it’s only half a breakfast. Bartering with neighbors then, but for fewer than we could eat. On the other hand, we do have an abundance of potatoes, brotherly tubers which I have always believed own a secret heart, one that strengthens me so long as I eat it in grace.

Notice that each paragraph has a pattern. They begin with the pedestrian and proceed to the melodramatic. My dreaming is off quickly becomes a mind roiled with the universe. But then I am reading Dickinson at night, and while stirring the soup for dinner yesterday, Thomas Jefferson on Educaton and God.

Writing in the sharp clarity of morning, when the mind remains a modestly open cup yet awaiting the overflowing world of sensual and intellectual data. Making tea in the morning these days instead of coffee which feels right, though for the life of me I can say why. It has something to do with time, and also the speed at which my mind leaves my body. My goals today are words and walking, in that order, and also to have goals.

Two days ago walking in the rain with a cup of tea, penumbral shadows everywhere I looked. These 4 a.m. walks are fast becoming the only moments of the day in which the words “desire” or “grace” have any use. I imagine I see deer, calm bucks the size of pickups, watching as I pass. The question of who to help and how continues to vex. When I tell people I head to the woods before the sun rises, they always ask if I’m scared. These days, only noon scares me and I spend the afternoon recovering. “I do not live in the world in which you live,” I want to say to them and, thankfully, manage not to.

Today promises more of the same. The waning moon was so bright slipping through the western tree line that it appeared blue (the mind said blue where the eye saw white), and I stood dazed in the field watching wisps of cloud blow across it. The sounds wind makes changes depending on the trees through which it passes. Pine trees in particular yield a soothing music. On the way back I tried quoting parts of “Death of a Hired Man,” and came up with nothing, other than a vague sense that I never liked the hired man or for that matter the husband and wife musing on what to do with him. Death solves all our problems.

Social media (sic) and television getting louder and louder in a brain that wants only a still pond. “All ponds need looking at,” wrote Matthew, with whom I have not yet gone fishing. The still pond the better to consider death. Why pretend otherwise? I like to think it all comes down to money but in fact it doesn’t. That’s “the secret.” Such foolishness in stumbling over dark trails in the company of dogs and little moon beams and yet I persist. Even now, hours later, I am not quite forgotten.

I forget how the old cemeteries haunt me.  The seventeen-year-old who drowned in August of 1782 and his mother who died a scant month later.  Grief and loss and a gap into which the mind rushes, inclined to fabrication.  The snake going before me in tangled grass, shadows of ferns, and my father using a black cane to clear away the obscuring growth.  Beer cans and a black gun, hidden in the hollow of a rotten oak.  Oh, and the gaping black maw of the earthen vault, in which I never see what I fear I will see, which is no comfort.

Pondered a tweet last night – “the horse foundered a bit, and I foundered too” – but knew only the latter half of the sentence was true, so let it go.  Couldn’t sleep, troubled by a sense that I had betrayed myself at some point in the previous few days, a mystifying accusation but too acute to ignore.  Drank of glass of water in the dark dining room, leaning on the North-facing window sill, studying the cool flickering stars, listening to the chickens mutter dreaming.  The night sky is always where the coming seasons first shows itself – Fall unfolding, like a cool mirror slowly unshading.  This has been a sad summer, passing of the Dog Day’s Moon.

I remembered Steve Wood, too, who was kind to me at a difficult time, and first introduced me to the cemeteries – mowing the grass, trimming the deadfall (sic!), etc.  In particular I remembered the white pine we climbed off Dingle Road, scaling its windy peak and studying the blue distance, like a pair of musing crows.  How grateful and bewildered I felt!  As I so often – still – feel in the face of blessing.  And later my father became Cemetery Commissioner, and my tenure as undertaker began in earnest.  Some part of me is always heaving in knowing tandem with death.  How many men my age have dug by hand a grave for a human being?

Wordy soul!  I was surprised to fall back to sleep, insomnia being such a devoted companion, but I did, and gently too.  Woke to the sound of Chrisoula grating zucchini, a comfort, and only minutes later the children, their voices light in the sunny kitchen, like little lost canaries coming home.

Kids and dogs in the Bronson Brook yesterday, my brain buzzing with art and the perils of business acumen and also from giving driving directions to a beautiful woman.  Someone asked Andrew the same question I’ve been asking him more or less for the past year, why are so many of the faces gazing upwards?  Though for me it’s less the upturned face than the outstretched arms.  What does it mean to you, he responded, being more interested in his role as vessel than interpretative medium.  We project into the work of others what is in us that we cannot bear – in this instance, yearning for grace, longing for beauty – to hold on our own.

Or so I thought, kicking around in later afternoon water, which is always a solace no matter how crazy life or I feel.  Sophia wandered off by herself, searching for polished glass on the banks, Fionnghuala splashed in the shallows holding my hand.  Jeremiah stripped and crossed to the far bank, crawling back through blossoms of white water like Gollum sans his ragged loincloth.  Earlier – before visiting Andrew – I had stopped by the west branch of the Westfield River to pray and breathe, to be aware of the deep fatigue that begins somewhere inside my bones and radiates outward.

I often wallow too long in mysteries, in material I don’t understand, and come away as baffled as ever.  Reading lately about acupuncture, meridians, transformational grammar, Merton’s coded Buddhism.  Jeremiah asked about evolution last night while falling to sleep, Where did the first monkey come from?  And despite being tempted to say Adam or Let’s talk about it in the morning, I turned on the light, went scrounging through the basement for the old Time Life book “Early Man” that so entertained me as a child, and showed him the chart of evolution.  Chrisoula came in as well and we talked about the move from quadruped to biped, the growth of the brain, etc.  He asked something similar about the river earlier as well, What was here before the river?

The grackles move into flocks, the first of the leaves begin turning.  How fast time seems to be moving!  I worked a bit with this line or pair of images – “waning quarter moon, trout shadows” – but got nowhere.  Why is the river so cold, asked Sophia, and I said, Because it moves and so the sun cannot hold it long, which on the one hand was unsatisfactory to both of us and yet on the other hand – and there is always another hand – moved both of us to what felt like reverential silence as we stared into the water that sluiced around our knees.  Forgiveness matters, as does accepting the possibility that we really don’t know anything but can learn.

As a child I was obsessed with the moment where wakefulness becomes sleep.  I would lay in bed, feel each breath, the long slide into the rich and fertile darkness of dreams, and yearn to retain some conscious recollection of that moment.  To pause on the border, look both ways, to cross by choice.

There was, in this, some interior recollection – a gathering, an organizing – of death.  What I would later turn to Emily Dickinson (and Plath too though differently) for, a brave and deliberate consideration of death, a shrugging off of both gloss and pith.

I recall all this because talking with Andrew last week he casually if abruptly described death as “a last wall we all have to break through,” in the same spirit as a dancer will struggle to attain a difficult pose, hold it briefly in perfection, and then, having done so once, be effectively relieved of the struggle.  As if we might in life strike some essential timbre by which dying becomes . . . what?  Merely another dream, merely another drawn breath.  A thing we know, have always known.

And blah blah blah, as Art Garfunkel (I think it was Art, not Paul) says in “Save The Life Of My Child.”  I always loved the refrain at the end, humming it at the bus stop even – “Oh my grace, I got no hiding place.”

That moment – that point of crossing – is discernable when I watch my own children fall to sleep.  It is as if a huge breath outside of us is slowly released, a small breeze stirring the curtains.  Faint scent of rosemary, of gardens after rain.  Their little bodies soften and settle and you can almost feel the rhythm of the dream as it rises off them like mist, pale luminaries on a yet-unfinished path.

Oh and yesterday, driving home at dusk, I slowed to watch a single crow hop along a pasture’s edge, its head drooping as if searching for something it knew had been lost forever.  “Crow grief,” I thought, and held that thought, despite believing that I know better.

A summer night that seemed to belong to someone else, though I always struggle against the inevitable feeling that I’m only or always a guest here.  The far trees blurred with heat, fat moon rising the color of seething coals.

Thinking often these days of Mary Oliver, that line somewhere about horses eating clover, as so often I find myself staring at those huge jaws ripping sweet greenery from the earth.  A toss of the head, a soft tearing sound, then the contented crunching.  It is helpful sometimes to study ourselves through the eyes of certain animals – dogs, horses, trout.  We look silly, speculative, not unkind.

I watched a crayfish scooch in and out of his silty castle the other morning.  Everyone feeding ducks or splashing in cool water while I readied the canoe.  I love crayfish, their inclination to stillness, the sudden flash backwards at the slightest sign of trouble.  That poof of dust that means you missed them.  As a child I hunted them with delight, little brown and blue lobsters, sometimes roasting them over open flames, but now it pleases me simply to know they’re there.  As if we have a secret, we two.  Or maybe I’m just getting off on choosing not to ruin their day.

Meditation, says Merton, has to be rooted in life.  Otherwise it produces nothing but “the ashen fruits of disgust.”  The real risk (it seems) to me being self-satisfaction, spiritual smugness.  The quietest, fullest moment yesterday was watching a spider over the kitchen sink wrap a fly in its velvety web.  Sophia, Chrisoula and I transfixed.  Later, walking through the house at 4 a.m. listening to the neighbor’s steer bellow in his raspy voice, only weeks left between that lovely field of his and a cold freezer.  Is that why he complains?  Does he feel somewhere in his bones the inevitable end?  Write it, a voice in my head whispers, and I do, nearly always.

The trout was gone, fetched from the reedy bank by . . . my guess is a bear, though I am somewhat crazed in my desire to encounter them.  Maybe a raccoon.  Whatever it was, the dogs went into a tizzy at the smell, first nearly burying themselves in the mud, then running in tight circles up and down the trail, following the creature’s scent.  One – Song, the younger – found some scat and had a delicious roll, successfully ruining any possibility of identification.  The sense always that one is being followed, and not necessarily in a bad way.

The mournful Irish whistle (low D maybe?) piped over a mist-swept farm yesterday afternoon.  I tried to focus on the interview, on my notes, but kept going back to 1989, the shores of Bantry, where I lived a few precious weeks.  Smoking cigarettes and gulping hot tea at dawn surrounded by curious sheep, staring at the bay and the rocky cliffs beyond.  It was harder to breathe in those days, running as hard as I did.

Falling asleep last night Jeremiah mumbled, We cannot make our hopes come true.  And when I asked him to explain he replied, We cannot make it rain or not rain.  And when I asked him who can make it rain or not rain he said, irritated now, It would take me an hour to explain it.  So we drifted off, lovely slippage into lost dreams.

And:  tomatoes with feta, steamed kale, raw garlic sliced with apples . . . And coffee of course.  The first cup of the day is always the best.

The mind turns to pancakes – with fresh blueberries, fried in butter, then decked with maple syrup.  A longing for sweetness, or simply to be filled.  And that line from Merton as well, in Contemplative Prayer, about the hidden work of the spirit delivering us to grace.  The horse plowed through clover once it saw the familiar barn ahead, and the cumulus clouds built overhead to a biblical degree.  “The spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”  What a lovely phrase!

More specifically, a pair of does browsing in Plainfield the other night, color of burlap in the rainy dusk, jittery and beautiful.  I was annoyed with the car ahead of us – it slowed to a stop (you roll by slowly, otherwise they flee, and why disrupt their dinner?).  I swung out to pass, thinking I would stop, roll down my window and lecture the idiot about the proper way to appreciate a couple of does at dusk.  But then I saw the driver and his passenger, both of them old and frail, and saw too the look on their faces – utter joy, literally palpable.  So I shut up and kept driving.  Baby steps, really.

Yet why rail against yourself just because you were almost a jerk?  Carrying Fionnghuala on my shoulders through the forest earlier, I stopped to study fallen acorns.  “Green!  Green!” she cried, pocketing one to show Chrisoula.  Later we laughed at the bullfrogs floating in the shallows of the pond.  I got annoyed – again! – with whomever caught and left to die a fine trout, ten inches at least, thje soft silver of its bottom gazing back at the paler moon, already overhead.  But then was comforted somewhat thinking some lucky bear or raccoon would stumble on to it.  All things for a reason, which if it isn’t true, should be.

In that same chapter, Merton flags the “right use of effort” in prayer.  Or “application of effort,” I forget.  I do remember this, though:  “When one is obeying God, a little goes a long way.”

When the curtains are closed the bedroom is suffused with green light, reminiscent of the ocean.  Or a just-cleaned aquarium, humming in a corner of the house.  Yesterday, Fionnghuala struggled to sleep and I rubbed her tiny back and crooned made-up hymns in a low cracked voice.  Here come the dream fish, here come the sleep fish.  She slipped under for forty minutes maybe, not enough, and surfaced cranky.  So we walked the dogs, ears cocked for thunder.

So the summer passes.  Rain mostly, the few sunny days putting me in the mind of Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer In A Day.”  Also yesterday, while walking the horse up Broom Street, we saw four bears – a momma and three cubs – tumbling across the road.  The horse went rigid, her breath a bellows, but my heart lifted at the sight of them, went wild as a kite.  After, while the horse browsed leggy clover, the bears gone into cool shadowy forest, I said to Sophia, did you see them?  Did you see them?  As if I were Thomas had he been there in the Upper Room.  What was it Voltaire said?  If God did not exist we would have to invent him.  Or find bears.

My own dreams these days involve rescue, hero’s trading masks with one another, everyone asking, What is the real danger?  What is the real work?  James Hillman paraphrased:  Don’t interpret your dreams – let your dreams interpret you.  I wake up wordy, a poor but sincere vessel, mustering songs beneath albumen skies.