A wandering photographer, I

Particularly scintillating conversation at piano bar last night, and afterwards, at breakfast with reive. Had a discussion with her about passion, and dreams, and ambition that left me feeling more "this has to start happening now" than I have been in ages; am blocking out the weekend for photography, as I plan out a list of Manhattan locations which I think will speak to me, photographically. So strange and wonderful, to feel muscles coming back to life, which I thought had gone slack forever.


And, unrelatedly, am thinking of someone I care about who's going through something particularly stressful right now. I wish you- and him- and the best, f.v.

Even the trees

(No, I'm not posting this because it has coyotes in it. Much.)

I was in B&N briefly this afternoon, getting the day's caffeine ration, when I spotted Arthur Miller's autobiography. I have mixed feelings about Miller as a writer, but the concluding passages of the book are so beautiful and true, and so spiritually in line with my own beliefs, that I copied them out.

I have lived more than half my life in the Connecticut countryside, all the time expecting to get some play or book finished so I can spend more time in the city, where everything is happening. There is something about this forty-year temporary residence that strikes me as funny now. If only we could stop murdering each other we could be a wonderfully humorous species. My contentment discontents me when I know that little happens here that I don't make happen, except the sun coming up and going down and the leaves emerging and dropping off and the occasional surprise like the recent appearance of coyotes in the woods. There is more unbroken forest from Canada down to here than there was even in Lincoln's youth, the farms having gradually vanished, and there is even the odd bear, they say, a wanderer down from the north, and now, these coyotes. I have seen them. They have a fixed smug grin, as though they just stole something. And they cannot be mistaken for dogs, whom they otherwise resemble, because of their eyes, which look at you with a blue guilt but no conscience, a mixture of calculation and defensive distrust that domestication cured in dogs thousands of years ago.

And so the coyotes are out there earnestly trying to arrange their lives to make more coyotes possible, not knowing that it is my forest, of course. And I am in this room from which I can sometimes look out at dusk and see them warily moving through the barren winter trees, and I am, I suppose, doing what they are doing, making myself possible and those who come after me. At such moments I do not know whose land this is that I own, or whose bed I sleep in. In the darkness out there they see my light and pause, muzzles lifted, wondering who I am and what I am doing here in this cabin under my light. I am a mystery to them until they tire of it and move on, but the truth, the first truth, probably, is that we are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees.

-Arthur Miller
Timebends