In the middle of spring—a kind of threshold—one realizes that one cannot take the
world into one’s lap and hold it, while this is perhaps our desire when we are our
most tender and best selves. The oxygens are important, but the oxygens are also small
parts of the whole universe. I mean the seen and the unseen, the preferences of horses—the
shade or sun as well as their standing as they do wrapped in the mathematical shape
of this could go on forever without you—and also the world that resists ingestion, speculum, observation. This is the bird-like
nature of the world. A landscape is simple, but you approach it and it is coy. And
even as your best self, you are energized by the world’s destruction, wishing it could
happen more swiftly, brutally, and observably than its imperceptible sloughing of
fine dust and small children. If you are one who has exchanged personal comfort for
the deep exquisite that eddies in the unknown, you are heroic. You are extraordinary.
You must participate in the inevitable corruption of the material world and also to
love it recklessly.
