Chapter One

In the darkness of the night, it is ravenous, and we are aware. On some level we know everything.

The birds come tenderly, with their little jerking motions and turn their heads to study us. And we believe they have no clue as to who we are or what is important in the world. In the darkness, when what we refer to as light is gone and we have lit the air with our own light, with our inventions there in the moments, it is necessary to ease back and let it come, much the same as when my dad taught me to relax in the water. I remember how difficult that was, knowing with this deep terror within me that the water might drown me. I had choked on it before, felt the awful spasms my body did trying to free itself.

            There are some things in the world. So many things that are in the world near us. And we have the night that comes tenderly. It really does. There is a tenderness there. And when you allow yourself to ease into it, yes. There it is, even in the softness of the cat’s fur when it comes with that wickedly slinky movement that has the breath, the subtle movement in the air. And isn’t it true that we ignore these gentle reminders? Is gentle the word? Something casually there, nearby. Right there in the liquid glimmer, the softness of color, the deep green of the summer foliage that has crept up so quietly from the earth again, having crept as it always does, sprung with power and determination from the earth into our time. It brings more scratches, more of the barest taps upon the fragrant, sensitive bones in our bodies and upon the intricacies of nerve and connections, the synapses within the devastatingly complex intricacies of what we have named our brains, which scare us. The raw, pungent slap of despair of that cold understanding of something savage, raw, and unsettling.

            And in the impertinent whining of a gnat or mosquito as it hovers near, drawn to our sweat, what my grandmother called perspiration because she said it was nicer to say that. She thought of the word sweat as crude and awkward, not very nice.

            In the silt scattered near the woodsy areas, in the wetness and the damp that collects in them, in the woods, as night has crept down and these subtle, nearly invisible breaths of air and mist have clung as unseen shadow, we work very hard to distance ourselves from it. We would flee all of it, each curved and quiet breath of cold grass blade and the slow effervescing interchange of oxygen and gasses seeping cold and weird upon the complexity of this insurgency, this tenacity of life that grips the earth with fibrous, stringy fingers evolving through the many years into roots capable of pulling rich nutrients from the soil.

            So what is my point?

            It has something to do with who we are and what we are becoming. And it seems that we must begin to get quiet and let go of our tenacious hold on the reality we have created for ourselves. When we speak of this presence, we have to come at it here in this sense, where we learn to let go our fierce grip. I know it sounds strange sometimes. And I have fears about it. I mean, I am here even now, looking up toward the top of this one tree. And I just have the sense that in the edges, the quiet presence of these things that surround us, we have answers to so many questions. And one of the grandest is about this presence we call God.

In the beginning, when it was mostly just this life on the planet, before the humans arrived, this same world was here. And it was not the empty place we might imagine. I believe, when I sit here and lean back, remembering the wash of the sea, the thrum and rumble of the sea, I can nearly sense it. I have this hunch, this push to explore this. For if we really would embrace this presence and begin to grow, we have to backtrack. It is not that we become somehow primitives, or ignorant. It is more that we learn again what we have forgotten, which is how to be still, and allow this stillness to wash over us.

In my experience of this entity, there were seldom cymbals crashing, the way they did when my grandmother, Nana, took me to one of the high school football games when I was maybe four and I was fascinated by the flat, bronze-colored disks that would make such a reverberating noise as what must have been a high school kid whacked them together, bringing each hand in a quick, graceful collision and releasing that thrashing, splashing eruption of brassy sound that escaped to roll cross the dampness of the autumn high school Friday night, and these high school students in their limp band uniforms became symbols of the primal pull within us that causes us to assemble in the night for contests played upon a field, and then—led by these beating, thumping drums, horns, and trumpets, we cheer and urge on the violence and performances upon the field.

            And we wonder who we are, supposing that we have come far upon the road toward sophistication. And yet we must somehow remember who it is we have been, and how even now at this far-flung moment in time, surrounded by our technology of which we are excited and proud—we must backtrack and find ourselves, explore ourselves, and concede that in many ways we have not come far at all. And we must learn anew to associate with this entity, this presence which has hovered over all the earth, protectively and patiently, since before we were here in our present form, waiting and still, anticipating the explosions that will propel us out into the universe prepared for us and waiting.