So: How to live? Just filling a day, I learned in my little cabin, is a tricky but essential business. I could much sooner tell you the way I’d like to spend a life than the way I’d like to spend an hour. Lives are fun to play with: I’ll be a writer! An astronaut! A world traveler! It’s harder to make yourself into a noun in the span of a day. Days are about verbs. In the cabin, there were too many options, and none of them very exciting. Read, write, walk, run, split wood, bake bread, pick berries, call my mom, hunt the mosquitos that had snuck into the cabin? Most of what I did in that cabin was mundane. There aren’t many stories worth telling. There aren’t many moments I remember.
Every once in a while, some unexpected thing would sneak up on me. I’d have a moment that would later stand out as traumatic or funny or odd, as electric or vivid or lovely. Watching fall’s first northern lights swivel on my long walk home along the highway after a potluck, seeing the snowy peaks of the Alaska Range absorb the pale pinks and oranges of a midnight sunset, stumbling into an abandoned mining camp near the little cabin with a surreal collection of century-old cameras and eagle-embossed stoves wedged in the moss. Standing still as the moose and her calf bolted into the trees. Waking to the barking owls.
One ordinary morning toward the end of the summer, I poured my coffee into a mug and carried it outside. I sat on a patch of lichen and brushed my hands over clumps of crowberries. I breathed deep. The air carried the bite of autumn, of the cold that was soon to come. I looked up. The longer I sat there, the more I discovered that just the breeze could bring me into the right here and now. I pressed the warm mug against my collarbone, and stared at the mountains, which were grey-blue in the distance. The wind whipped and bent. The aspen and birch leaves, now more yellow than green, shimmied and shook. After I looked long enough, I began to connect sound with space. I could see which mosquito circled where, which gust hit which leaves, which branches creaked with which breeze. Soon, I could see it, right there in my front-yard: the world alive with so much dance.
Light shifted; the winds rose and fell. The day unfurled until dusk eventually arrived with its warm light and long shadows. I wandered around the woods as the landscape blued. I walked over sticks and through berry bushes, their leaves turning a deep red, their fruit dark and soft. My hands smelled of spruce sap.
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