As Perfect As

As we slip now into deepest autumn, I find—to my great surprise, as I have no recollection of it whatsoever—this draft. Before I write the thing I came to write, here is a dispatch from August:

…

There have been so many moments when I’ve recalled some extraordinary occurrence—some profound memory—and thought, “I’ll never know another [x] as good as that. It was truly perfect.“ Some twilight on some hill facilitated by some Land Rover, some swim in a remote body of water, some heavenly bath, some jaw-dropping meal, some burning sunset or solitary walk or some hand held at just the right moment in just the right place.

And yet I do keep having profoundly beautiful experiences.

Does one get used to them and therefore they feel less special?

Does one become so attached to them—so dependent upon them—that one designs them into everyday life and therefore they become less extraordinary by virtue of regularity?

I am so desperate for beauty and solitude—for moments to stop and observe deeply—that I have tried to make those sublime and meditative experiences as regular as possible… And yet this defeats them. It makes them less precious. Is this why we travel? To keep things novel? To make it so that we cannot know or expect everything? To give ourselves room for surprise? for wonder?

I carefully researched how to build an outdoor shower inexpensively, and finally I did so early this summer. I got as far as the plumbing and fixture. It is a glorious, simple thing, and still it makes me so happy I could squeal every time.

There is no enclosure yet. I almost cannot bear to build it. We simply shower in darkness, throwing our towels over the nearby deck railing. Its bare-bones nature is one of its most endearing qualities.

There are enough bushes to hide behind in the event that someone is coming from the risky direction on the “Oh Shit” curve next to which my house is located. No one sneaks up on you here. It is too quiet, and at night we see the lights coming from quite a ways off. You simply duck behind the enormous burning bush if you feel too exposed, but only the most local of locals can drive that curve—which is also a steep incline—without their eyes fixed firmly on the road. It is dangerous, and in the snow the lower end of my driveway is where people skid off the road because they’ve underestimated either the conditions or the sharpness of the curve. (It is also where they turn around in the other direction when they realize they can’t get up the steep hill because the road is too slick.)

I think it is very strange to feel so private even as headlights round the bend nearby, making their way along the hill. And yet it does feel private.

Same as our magical picnic beach on the shores of a lake high in the mountains of Italy. We scrambled down a bank to get there. We ate. We stripped. We swam. We bathed in the hot sun and chilled our wine the cool, turquoise waters, our bottle’s bobbing anchored by a rock or two I had carefully arranged. Our vulnerability in this place was a key element of its sweetness.

Once, a man—also nude—did appear out of nowhere, making his way along the rocks. My friend—far bolder than I, and especially when naked—firmly shooed him away from what we felt was our magical picnic beach. It was no more ours than his. I’m sure we were trespassing. He probably was, too. But he needn’t have trespassed on our sense of place. There was plenty of space for him to enjoy outside of our bubble.

I don’t go to our lake anymore. I had lost that feeling of oneness with the water and the heavens. I have lost that friend, too, and like that lake, I miss her most days even though our parting was the messiest and most confusing of my 37 years. Perhaps the sweetness of that kind of openness and vulnerability is so important to me that, having finally re-located that long-lost feeling of closeness and belonging in a hillbilly-engineered shower on the side of a mountain in Virginia, I almost cannot bear to close myself off from the field and the stars. They give me something I need, something I had lost. I want to feel a part of my environment, to disappear into it. Weave me into the tableaux of this magical place I inhabit. All summer the fireflies play down in the field in darkness, and on a clear night innumerable stars shine brightly above. Open to the road, the field, and the heavens, you feel amongst them—those stars and fireflies. You feel part of a greater scene, a small part of an important whole. It’s easy to embrace the vulnerability of being exposed rather than shrink from it. There is a connectedness I almost cannot bear to lose, even if it also means I could shower at 3pm on a Saturday in July after I finish weed-eating the property. Let me rest in my vulnerability.

And let that vulnerability be a culmination of all that has been good and bad in my life… all the lessons, the places, the people I have come to know. And let me never lose my willingness to stop and observe, nor my gratitude for all that I find, all that I feel. Let me never mind if the deer sleeping in the soft grasses of the field see me going about my business. Let me exist in this place without hesitation.

And let these moments be a balm to all the political anger and dread I have felt this year. I am so tired. I have leaned hard on this old house this year, and though it is never-ending work, it has saved me from despair over and over again.

Someone with a very expensive camera could have captured the sky I saw tonight, but still the lens would show only a fraction of what I felt with my whole self. It is a vibration, a resonance, a harmony of sorts... Difficult to put into words, hence the endless desire simply to be in that experience bodily, to engage and overwhelm my every sense.

Even as these moments continue to find me, I know that I will always compare them to the wonder I felt in a certain period of my adulthood when I first awakened to the existence of such things… That wonder—its newness and overwhelmingness—I don’t think can be surpassed. I set the bar high quite early on. I feel only gratitude for that.