From Unmarked Box to Unmarked Box

Yesterday the rain settled in and all night I listened to its song outside my bedroom window as I drifted in and out of dreaming. Though it's still warm, fall is definitely here.  It's been a slow shift and still somehow hit with a bang. It feels like everything embodies that narrative lately. I watch a slow turn and then suddenly I'm looking at the other side of the thing.

The sky is white and I've had strange little hints of reminders the past few days of places I've been, places that feel so far and distant it's hard to imagine they once felt close to the marrow of me, places I feel fondness for and places I feel grateful to have left behind, bullets I managed to narrowly dodge, trainwrecks I watched unfold in the rearview mirror... in the same breath there have been breezes blowing through with the intoxicating scent of future possibility, directions that—like this impending season—feel fresh and grounding, full of earthy wonder.

This year, like every other, I went to visit the swifts for my birthday. I watched them gather in the sky, flutter and swirl, dart and soar, and was reminded once again of the way they work together, the way they so perfectly embody the singularity and togetherness that I feel in the world. They coalesce and converge, then break form—a mass of seeming chaos—then just as quickly, drop a wing and are one again. There was a time I would have called this the closest thing to religion I know how to understand, the way we are all—imperfectly—a part of something bigger.

Once, I wanted to trace the flight patterns of birds on paper, macro and micro—30 seconds, a lifetime. I made them up in short bursts of thread, of ink, tracing their way across paper. Do their movements across the sky, the continents follow those same patterns of tributaries, bark, the veins of a leaf, the veins beneath my own skin?

Somehow now though, the abstraction feels a little deeper, a little more distant. This year, my body is my body. That little bird body is his own. 2 beating hearts, a million. Meaning is less born of the sameness, the layering of pattern. Tangible proof isn't what I'm after, not exactly. The weight is no longer in making visual the gaps and convergences. The call I feel is something like wanting to learn to be them. This year my fantasy is to trace their goings more specifically, fly alongside them—if only in short jaunts in the metal body of a jet. This year my fantasy is to spend a year with them, see what they show me in the moments without the grandstanding of their yearly show, break free of the metaphors that have grown up around them in my own yearly rituals. I want to see their quiet moments. It is in those moments, I think, that I might find the simple beauty of the easing between community and singularity, the way a life is built in the accumulation of those moments.

I have always wanted to be that last bird in the sky, the one diving and darting alone as night falls, with the safety of the rest just below, waiting. This year I want to learn the ease of transition, slipping easily back and forth between that solitary delight and the pleasure of the whole, making something beautiful together.