Pt 1.

It is Spring here: I wrestle myself from my cocoon in the mornings to walk barefoot across hard wood floors into the sunlight that litters the room, to the loyal snout of a dog that hunts my long shadow with the single-minded intensity of her nature. I ask nothing more of her and she only wants my hands and food in return.

It is easy to dichotomize and so often we do. We live simply, the dog and I. There are city mice and there are country mice and I suppose that I am the latter. The city mice look down on our types for being naive, for lacking a certain grit that can only be acquired with daily exposure to smog, fresh urine coated buildings, and endless motion. And yet, it is the environment that allows for innocence that becomes so appealing. "What I call innocence is the spirit's unself-conscious state at any moment of pure devotion to any object." It's not impossible for the other half to achieve. It is the goal. I seek it no matter where I stand: a street corner in Beijing, a mountain in North Caroline, the intersection of K and 21st, the sun room of my house... It is easy here, where I come face to face with a world that created itself; a world thats sphere barely touches my own.

"I loafe and invite myself" just as many have. I seat myself at the edge of a large drop and throw rocks to the bottom where a shallow creek runs. I have never known as I do here. I have never loved as I do now. There is no one in sight, but there is everything around. The rocks hit leaves that have never been touched by the prongs of a rake; they do not make a cracking noise, but rather a soft thump of having hit a pillow. If I tune my eyes correctly, I can see a grasshopper make the same leap from the leaf cushion to the creekside as the rock. He is a gazelle. I am a titan.

"In a field, I am the absence of field... Wherever I am, I am what is missing." I could be more than this. I could, if only I could let the private holiness of this place, where I am an intruder, enter my heart and grow through my body like endless reaching vines. But this would require a leap greater than the grasshoppers, the rock, or even the spring of a cave cricket in the dark of a basement. It would require more love than I have to offer. Love here is the act of whole selflessness, the complete abandonment of the character we cultivate, to create a life, a moment, a feeling, of pure devotion for no other purpose than because it can be. It is the dog chasing a shadow, it is the caterpillar walking across the grass bridges.

So I loafe. I invite myself to someone else's party. I open my mouth an wait for the oak pollen to dye my tongue all shade of green. I imagine if it could grow inside of me, make me take root at this very spot, on this very day. How then, I would no longer be the absence of the field, but the field itself.