There are points in the career of an artist, whatever his or her art, where the collision of beautiful forces – the fluency of artistic technique, the fullness of life experience, the vibrancy of physical form, and the collaboration with artistic equals – like the splitting of atoms, crash together to release pure and nearly-perfect light.

It is the brilliance of beginnings. No: it is the brilliance of what follows just after, when the uncertainty of a beginning falls away, and there is a comfortable happiness and ease in creating something together. As an audience for that art, you hope that as your favorite performers mature their skill increases, their stamina holds out, and beauty continues to flow from their hands or mouths or minds: like Joni Mitchell or Paul Simon; like the best works of Woody Allen; like Bob Dylan or Georgia O’Keefe, like the dancers and composers and writers and painters that have decorated your generation.

Samuel Pepys did not have a laptop; but if he did, imagine the number of words.

I imagine also that the kinds of conversations between Sam and his digital ego. Cataloguing the mundane, the divine and the profane, the human attempts and the human failures, the hope that attends the former, and the regret which follows the latter. In the polaroid snap of an internet eye, it is all captured, clearly or blurred, and offered up like a neon flash on the downtown strip.

Because the stone is washed by the riverspray, and pine needles litter its surface, the girl walks carefully. As the root-stained water boils through the canyon, its incessant stirring cutting cauldrons in the bedrock, as pebbles are spun around and around and around, the voice of the current is a roar that doesn’t pause for breath, is almost a magnetic force, and the girl inches forward to look over the lip into the froth. Inches forward, as the stone itself slopes down into the water, polished and pulled by rising and lowering volume, it’s as if (the mother feels, without putting thoughts to the feeling) as if a hand were reaching up to draw her daughter down and in. It is true (the mother knows, without putting feelings to the thoughts) that there are meters of stone before girl and water meet; some is dry; the girl is careful and agile; today is not her day to depart… But knowing is one room of the self; and from another room, decorated by generations of mothers and their losses, a cry rises up of avenging, protecting angels and shouts the girl back from the edge. Her voice is small against the water’s fall, it seems a wisp, a whispered plea, a fleck of sound, a seed in a stronger wind.

“Don’t.”

Behind the counter, a seventeen-year-old is washing glasses and setting them to dry on a cloth by the mirror. Her back is to the room, but from as she washes, dries, sets a glass upside down, and them repeats, her eyes go up and to the left and follow guests as they enter and leave. Her friend is waiting tables. It is mid-morning, and it is July, when the trees have set their fruit, but haven’t yet added blush to the apples, or sweet to the grapes.

Yesterday I received a book as a gift.

It measured 8 1/2 by 6 1/2 inches, and contained 256 printed pages (including index), with another five in introduction and eight more in bookplate, title, copyright, dedication, contents, and trailer pages, in all about an inch and a half of paper between the hard covers. The covers themselves were a silvery-gray matte, embossed with a marble texture that allowed patches of sheen to show through washes of barely-felted cloth; the slipcover provided decoration: a smiling Brother Victor-Antoine d’Avila-Latourrette seated before the gate inside his garden, holding a hand-turned wooden bowl of ripe peaches, surrounded by his season’s harvest. Sweet peppers and mallows and basil and greens, dark beets and eggplant, mid-season red potatoes and green beans and the ripest red tomatoes.

“I was born in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, two blocks off the rail line - before it was abandoned, and then reclaimed for pedestrians and bicycles - so that the 7:45 and the 8:30 made audible bookends to my bedtime, first calling ahead, then calling behind, and finally the stuttered step of the cars over the crossing. We lived there five years, so I know that is one of my own memories, not just a story my mother…”

There is one line you cannot trace with your finger, and which you cannot follow with your eye. A melody, with words, describes the heart. And as the thread of notes is drawn out from the lips, drawn out like the finest line of silk, it is taken by the wind, it coils around a finger, it settles into residence in other lives, it is colored by sunlight and hidden by nightfall, it is raised up with a baby’s cry and deflated by lament for the departed…

At the risk of becoming a Byfield Weatherbug, I’d like to report that the day has begun with mountains again. To the East, a layer of clouds – which is so similar to yesterday’s formation that now I am thinking it must be ocean-bound fog – rests upon the Earth’s horizon like a ridge of Montana, which overnight had walked to the Atlantic, an augury which would make this Macbeth’s hair stand on end, if it weren’t already so stood, and if he had been visited by three crones in recent memory.

The pattern for everything in life exists – within everything that exists. The strength of modern scientific process which seeks to name all things, giving them genus, order and phylum, or physical properties which can be described by the arc of an equation, carries its own limitations: by disconnecting one object from another, we gain control over it, we see ourselves acting upon a unique object – for the sake of argument, oil – while conveniently blinding ourselves to the fact that everything – everything! – is interconnected, socially, politically, and physically. Burning a gallon of oil here moves a dollar from my hand to the hands of another… and another and another. Those dollars transform the face of a desert, into a garden of wealth and into a cataclysm of civil war. A gallon of oil is a gallon’s worth of smoke, is a gallon’s worth of warming and greenhouse gases. A gallon of oil today is one gallon less oil tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, so the colorful streamers of automobiles heading home from work, rivers of aluminum and combustion in white and red, which repeat themselves in every city of the nation, in every city of the globe, from here to London to Moscow to Beijing to Kuala Lumpur to Solo to La Paz to Iringa… sooner or later the current of every single river on the planet ceases to move.