We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men. ~Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tam Pico, I felt the life sliding out of me, a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear. I was seven, I lay in the car watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass. My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin. "How do you know if you are going to die?" I begged my mother. We had been traveling for days. With strange confidence she answered, "When you can no longer make a fist." Years later I smile to think of that journey, the borders we must cross separately, stamped with our unanswerable woes. I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand.

Naked, you are simple as one of your hands, smooth, earthy, small, transparent, round: you have moon-lines, apple-pathways: naked, you are slender as a naked grain of wheat.

Naked, you are blue as a night in Cuba; you have vines and stars in your hair; naked you are spacious and yellow as summer in a golden church.

Naked, you are tiny as one of your nails - curved, subtle, rosy, till the day is born and you withdraw to the underground world,

as if down a long tunnel of clothing and of chores: your clear light dims, gets dressed - drops its leaves - and becomes a naked hand again.

Early morning, on the fourth day towards acquiring a new habit of waking up with the yet unrisen sun. A mist hangs like a cloak over the semi dark woods. They are mysterious and simple arrayed like greens in a coloring book, parts of which have been colored too much: those edges tinged with black.

A sound of flowing water, dishes being washed at the tap. If that old Zen story of how enlightenment came and didn’t change drawing water and chopping wood is true, then perhaps there is enlightenment in washing dishes on early mornings. A moth is banging its head against the window. Its legs are longer than its wings. It must be this bright table lamp that it wants to approach. Its restlessness reminds me of my own groping towards light.

Dark shapes, wings, begin to move across the tree tops. Crows I say to myself. And slowly one of the clearings in the woods is turning into jade. These woods aren’t old as old woods go, but they appear timeless, unchanged and unchanging. Yet even as I write, new life is springing from the tree branches and from the earth.

If there is one good thing about this country, it’s the possibility to live close to such wild beauty. And I hope we have enough sense to preserve it. A bird alights on a branch of the tree closest to me. I try to see what it is. In the twin circles of my binoculars it is indistinguishable from the surrounding semi dark. Then it takes off and flies across the lighted patch of sky, a crow. It joins the community of crows hopping on the ground and begins to eat bread crumbs strewn there.

“Give us this day our daily bread”, I can’t but remember this prayerful line anytime I think of or encounter bread. It has the beauty of a simple well crafted thing. And that is what makes it holy, holy sharing the same root as whole. It’s a complete prayer; it says everything in just enough words. “Give us this day our daily bread”, I repeat it often to remind me of now-ness of this life and not to ask for anything more than bread: not a palace, or unlimited wealth or a BMW. These can’t be eaten; these can’t satisfy the hunger of the human soul. Only that portion of God given daily bread can.

More light now, yet not enough to turn off the table lamp. I think this is a sufficient metaphor to think about love, both human and divine. I imagine divine love as this huge dome of endless light at the end of a labyrinth-ous cave that can be and has to be approached prayerfully in this lifetime. Personal love, that we give and get, meanwhile is the lantern illumining the path as we make that journey towards this bright mouth of the cave. I would like to think of all this movement as a swarm of fireflies who are nudging each other along, even as sometimes some go back, sometimes some hit the walls, but yet slowly and surely everyone of them is approaching this great potency, to merge into this great beautiful light.

And when I think of this, I realize even more how prayer and meditation form the necessary compass that points us to the true poles of our lives. So to repeat what Alice Walker wrote, as I was reading a little while earlier, “Thank you Moon, Thank you Sun, Thank you Night, Thank you Day, Thank you Everything!