A page takes flight, like a folded airplane, and lands on a desk. A public servant seated at that desk notices movement, glances toward the 752 paper airplanes before them, many having missed the runway and skidded off to the floor, or worse, having barreled into the undiminished pile like a stone into a drift of last night’s snow, cause and effect of chaos’ avalanche.

The public servant, secure for life in a poorly-paid job, paws briefly at the pile to see what just flew in, with no hope of distinguishing new wings from old, new paper from old; and eight hours minus 15 minutes’ rest in the morning minus one hour of sunshine at luncheon minus 15 minutes break in the afternoon reduces one day to six-and-one-half hours of mind-numbing bureaucracy, this day every day minus weekends minus holidays minus funerals.

Fields of heather reach from the tarmac east, unbroken by even a single tree, rarely by a road, knee-high unbowed flowers that reach the sea. An inlet, in reality: behind you see a ridgeline rising, and on the ridges snow; past the ridges, over there to the north, Iceland’s 66th parallel, a frosty whisper south of the Arctic Circle.

I saw, as we flew in, the sparse houses huddled in the even sparser green, huddled near the shore where the demands of weather are not impossible to satisfy, the incursion of ice not quite a glacial burial, and the overlay of lava not too frequent, so that somehow, somehow, through experience and (equally important) sheer persistence, these humans just like you and just like me chiseled a foothold into the stone and tundra, so here they stayed, and here they remain, twelve-hundred years of history, speaking a language left them by the Vikings, composed in blood-lines and written out in lines of these faces.

The world spins and we spin with it. Years ago I was born near here; a year later I moved to there; then there, then there, then there. I changed cities, I changed countries, I changed continents; I walked as far as I could, and took a train when the road stretched too long; I boarded a plane when I ran out of rail; I ended up here.

I each of those places I called my home, I had the fortune to arrive after strife and depart before strife, at least as my heart measured it: others might have called my smallest journey struggle, and certainly the act of getting to know a new culture, and you yourself in relationship to it, is not for the faint of heart. Still, it becomes an art. (As Elizabeth Bishop famously, sadly wrote: The art of losing isn’t hard to master…").

There are advantages to learning to clutch with your left hand, and shift with your left foot. You might have the opportunity of riding down a gravel scree near the sacred beach in central Java, girlfriend on the back, wondering if at the bottom it would be a gradual recovery, or an abrupt conclusion; or you might be able to escape the teeming lost/party scene in Goa, to dodge cattle and wild pigs and dogs, to wiggle your head greeting to the locals, and to look out over bicentennial portuguese ruins at the Indian ocean… ah, where you might go, if you could ride a motorcycle…

The warung was four walls and a roof, twelve tables and a door, twenty-four slight and elegant locals,
one pallid westerner, and me.

The walls weren’t really walls, as we would imagine them in Europe or the States: what would they keep out? Woven bamboo that allowed light to escape and the afternoon breeze to enter, allowed the quiet river of Indonesian conversation to course in an out, to mingle with melati blossoms and diesel… and the fire of equatorial sun, and the overripe stench of durian… and the pulsing twitter of the bird market…

“So is it study or is it art?”

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle’s form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.  

Somewhere in between acquaintance and friend I asked why?, and she answered: I survived cancer. 

It was some years ago, she said, a decade now without another challenge. I counted back: how young! And the thought dissolved - as some thoughts do - becoming a gentle interior rain, washing down to common ground, what is was lost, is loosing its grip, will be taken away. I was trying to remember where that exact feeling, or a feeling closely akin, had touched me before: it is aligned with beauty. It might have been the first curl and browning edge of a rose petal. It might be a spot on the stem. If there were no beauty, the sense would not be the same…

The sun’s touch soft today, the air perfumed with sweetest taste of spring, simple, with no effort, the round globe leans toward its lover, longs for love, and every living thing becomes a blossom. I gave myself an hour - no more than an hour was needed - and left my labor to rest, set it on the desk, and stepped out into sun; it was just as I remembered it. The sky soon filled with overcast, the same moist cotton, grayed with pending rain, the same full drops suspended, the hint of ozone and the songs of birds, the motion that is not my own yet part of me, of which I am a part…

When you travel to a tourist destination, you see what you pay for, and what those who are selling rest wish you to see: in the case of Gulf coast Florida, there are miles of sand, comfortable and maintenance-free accommodations, food at the end of a short walk and at the sliding edge of your credit card, and night clubs or golf courses or day spas or ships or shops… That’s why they are here, so you can be here, too. It is a perfectly Disney establishment, where the name is here employed as an adjective. The world is peaceful, there are no cares, and all that is asked of you (for these few days) is that you… descontrair (couldn’t find a better word than the Portuguese, meaning to “un-contract”).

… and so all follows water’s path, from cloud to peak, from heights to valleys, from valleys to the sea; follows through channels that life itself creates, in currents at times quickened at times slowed by degrees of its descent. The selfsame wave that rises, falls; the selfsame lightning separating droplet from the whole, sees droplet join the torrent, follow current with the urging of this gravity-constant hand until, to end a sinuous trackless trail, again it joins the whole.