Evensong XI (15 March 2024)

 On staying alive.

Not like the Bee Gees but okay, maybe. Let’s sing and dance about it.

Could be disco. Could be danse macabre. Like Saint-Saëns.

Once during lockdown zoom, J and I mirrored each other’s love of language and encouragement. We met weekly to discuss each other's work.

This piece is coming together, we said.

These are good questions you’re writing into, we said.

Keep going, we said.

And then J said the thing that I carry with me on a post-it everywhere I go since that time of utterance:

Stay Alive, J said.

Vespers today on the mantra Stay Alive.

I wrote these words on a post-it and attach it to the door of wherever I happen to be living. Since 2020, that's been many places: New Haven, NYC, Los Angeles, Bogotá, a small village in the upper Andes in Colombia, Buenos Aires, New Orleans, Galveston, TX. Many little places in between: Upperville, Virginia; Savannah, Georgia; Chattanooga, TN; Washington, D.C.; Phoenix. Carlsbad. The Amazon Rain Forest. Truth or Consequences.

In September 2021, Hurricanes Henri and Irene brought the roof in.

Stay Alive, the note said. So, I packed it up and started traveling.

It didn't take long for the adhesive to lose its stickiness, so I bought a roll of blue painter's tape to stick it to the door every time I unpacked my suitcase. I made notes of everywhere I went. Who I met there. What I did there. What it smelled like. The kinds of trees and other plants I met. What the locals told me about these places. How I felt.

When the writing is good, when life itself is conspiring in my favor, I read the words of J that I attached to the door everyday as I went out for my walk. It was field work.

Walking is how I think. When the writing is good, when life itself is conspiring in my favor, the daily walk is the exercise of integrating my thinking into my body. Strengthen my muscles on the weight of the narrative. Crush the reps of questions - how many answers! list them, step to the rhythm of their pulse into being, rest - and don’t forget to breathe.

It is easy to Stay Alive in these conditions. These are more than survival times, they are the thriving times. Stay Alive to savor them. Such good advice from J! Stay Alive because the Right Now is too good to miss out on, to bliss out on!

Stay Alive!

But the overflowing cup spills into the street, runs down the gutter, pools in potholes. Dries up. The grief here is opaque and hard to see my way through. I don't understand the properties of this land, where the borders are, what the terrain is made of, the language spoken here is gesture and groan rather than articulated systems. This is the land of loss.

Stay Alive! the post-it reminds me as I walk now to think through the alchemy of joy into nothing. A ghost of itself on the side of the road.

Stay Alive.

In the fallow times, what supports life? Go deep like a saguaro’s roots. Or stay shallow and isolated like a bowhead whale. Whatever it takes to Stay Alive. Wait it out.

The void is the beginning of the overflow. Something can only be filled if it’s empty.

Stay Alive is a continuum. Stay Alive is a spectrum.

Stay Alive is a poem. All good poems turn. Wait for the turn. Stay Alive.