Sonder

The lady with white hair lifts the digested pinecone to her nose and smells it. The voided pinecone was gifted to her because she is the kind of person you would gift such things to. She holds it with both hands like it’s a baby bird, lifts it to her face. It smells slightly sweet but with a twang. She lowers it to her opened mouth and she eats it in order to be closer to the bear who had also eaten it.

When I struggle inside my mind, I think of her.

In the morning, she awakens and makes a thermos of tea that she takes with her up the mountainside that is marked by decades of her footfalls. When she gets to the top of a ridge, I imagine that she stops in the quietude, an ear to the canopy to hear the birds. She fills the thermos’ tiny cup with piping tea and sips. The sun rises at her back like a blanket enveloping her or is that a halo? The sun, if it could love, would love her. The sky, if it could pick and choose, would pick and choose every bird to sing to her. How many birds have alerted the world of her presence? Not enough, not enough.

When I want an elder, I think of her.

I imagine him in dark morning light. Standing in front of the mirror, he uses only his fingers to maneuver his hair to his liking. He is a man of fantastic beard and eyebrows. Inevitably, he is on his porch scribing the pairs of eyes in the darkness, the moody mist of the mountain, the soft heart-print walk of the deer. Later, he’ll be out in those same woods, always finding something new in all the old debris of Kairos and deep time. His witnessing, a marvel. I often think of his coats and how they hang motionless without him with a patience I wish I had.

When I want a brother, I think of him.

She lives alone and her favorite color is yellow. Her hair is curly and she does not know me even though I talk to her. Her days are spent building her body and her mind. She reads about a book a day, all the while balancing her body on a this-or-that or what-have-you. It is her doingness. It is her “labor of love”, reading all those books, creating a tapestry and universe of all their ideas and wonders. All those writers on her shelf and she is lonely, I feel it. And when she is lonely, she remembers her grandmother in Bulgaria. She walks the streets of New York City and admires the chipping yellow paint on a curb. She also admires moss and libraries and children. She deeply loves women she cannot have.

When I feel at a loss, I think of her.

As a restless child, he escaped into the night and walked in the wild darkness. Sometimes a bone of moon lit his path. He would lie about sleepwalking to his mother who caught him, even though he was wearing shoes. He learned to see in the dark. As a teenager gifted a book of haiku after a tennis match, he began to look closely at birds, and thus the universe. As an adult, he sat on prayer mats for hours in a Buddhist monastery in the Catskill Mountains until he cried from the pain of stillness. He fondly recalls the time he almost died while walking those mountains during a blizzard. No longer a monk, he pores over poems, bears witness to the Dark Madonna, and looks deeply into puddles. He gifts rocks to his children and his wife talks to the dead. He cries more than I do, which is something.

When I want a mystic to help me abandon the objective and unravel into the void, I think of him.

With her little dog, she lives in a valley amongst the wildflowers. She has almost died many times and is younger than I am. Horrors have happened to her, none of it my business, but they were horrors, no doubt about it. And I believe her even though I’ve never met her. Some may call her an ecological priestess. Some may call her an eco-philosopher as she spins golden narratives from the fodder of mycelia and tardigrades. Give her your hand and she’ll hand you a chanterelle. Give her your word and she’ll give you compost. She is compost. She does not believe in wellness or healing, but instead the dance with harm and with discomfort and so do I. She believes that this does not have to be a problem, and so do I. She has many friends and I am not one of them. If she wanted to form a cult, she certainly could.

When I want to be understood—when I want to remember how fluid, complex, and how tied to Earth we are, I think of her.

I barely know her anymore. Last I knew, she lived in Brooklyn, teaching children science in a moving bus. The last I saw her was in Ithaca, which is gorges, where she worked for a lab in Cornell. We walked the trails of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and if she were a bird, she’d be the gentlest feathered friend with a thin, small beak. Therefore, she’d be an insect-eater. This insect-eater told me a story about how she accidentally put diesel gas in her tiny car’s tank. That was really bad, she said, and laughed. She was a bright thing that told me about how Ithaca rarely sees the sun. I nodded yes, remembering the signs and fences on the tall bridge. Depressed? Call us for help. She is small and mild and bright like when the sun is covered by clouds.

When I want to practice mildness, I think of her.

Although a poet, she was known better as a gardener when she was alive. No one ever saw her but in the middle of the night, she descended from her attic and tended to the vines and leaves and blossoms. She was also one to leave and blossom. She is now a tome, dog-eared and bookmarked with ephemera. Her famous simile is about feathers. Is the Em-dash named after her?

When I want to be left alone, I think of her.

When I think of him, I think of sweaters. A walker of high ground and low ground and underground, I also think about his legs. He lives in a country where there are words like fen and down to indicate landscapes. An avid snacker of capsaicin, he swears by it to keep his mind sharp. I cannot eat a pepper without thinking about him. I envy his children, wishing for him to sit at my bedside and tell stories about underground rivers and the many times he could have died. I imagine him thinking about Barry Lopez as he performs the mundane tasks of existence: washing dishes, taking off his shoes, folding laundry, thumbing through pages of a magazine. His sweaters are soft and he likely petted the sheep from where the wool came. He takes full advantage of the right to roam.

When my landscape inspires me, I think of him.

I was the last person to see him alive. On that day, he sported a gifted cowboy hat to hide the cancer on his glorious head. More calm and mild than a dusty book of poetry, he had my heart. I could listen to his voice for hours and oftentimes wanted to call him dad. In his library, books of poetry are filled with his marginalia, little notes to his children, little poems and thoughts. He called his adult son honey. A two-foot pile of yellow legal pads full of his indecipherable writing. I can’t read Stafford without imagining his face.

When I think of Millicent and how she found the world, I think of him.

He once sat in my back seat, talking to another poet about the word silm, which means light shining on water. He talked about how he used this word to describe a woman’s wetness. He is a commander of gorgeous lists, has white hair, and possesses a grandiosity that I have convinced myself he deserves. A Californian, I once came across his name in the mountains of New York. As he talked with the poet in my back seat, the rain poured down and all I can think about was a woman’s wetness.

When I see an elaborate table of food, I think of him.

His name encompasses all the water and salt. And with that, all the softness and tumult. To hear him speak is—I don’t have words to describe it. His books—his children—are sent off as if down a river, no longer in his hands, and he accepts this. When I think of him, snow and skateboards, thin ankles and corduroy, glasses and crossed legs, come to mind. If he were to say a word to me, even by accident, I would hide behind the closest plant. He is snow falling. He is a dog yawning. He is journals filled, covered with leather. He is every handsome rug upon which I’d walk barefoot. If he would knock me down on accident, I’d say thank you.

When I put on a sweater to prepare for the cold, I think of him.

There is no way to end this.