“I feel like an empty tornado inside
with nothing to tornado about

and then it starts to rain on my tornado
and it rains for years…”

~ Isabela, age 10

Yesterday - or was it the day before? - winds from Alberta met winds from the Gulf, somewhere over the plains, at the heart of the continent, and the two in their meeting squeezed the sky, so that wave upon wave of hurricane rain washed east. Another spinning cell sat over the Atlantic, so that all of heaven and all of earth was a howling torrent, and the lives arranged upon its surface blowing leaves.

My younger brother is a musician and mathematician, an adventurer whose inquiries lead him to landscapes most people would never dream existed, much less find themselves exploring them. It isn’t enough to walk along planar geometries and simple proofs – that would be to walk in the Garden without admiring the flowers. The walk is well-trodden, and the flowers are the Mystery. So these flowers attract his attention, and once in a while we share some of their colors.

My daughter Isabela – less formally, more naturally Bela; though she is capable of carrying her more regal name, when called upon by the drama of the moment to do so – has traveled to Florida with her mother and brother, to be with her Brazilian grandparents and uncle and aunt for a few days. Ah, yes, and to meet the newest cousin, little Lucas, Luquinho perhaps, born a year ago in a country far from the familial home.

A certain slant of light or the softness of the breeze tells you; the brightness of the birdsong tells you it is morning. Most of the world is waking now, refreshed, while the night shift yawns and paws its way to bed. The light turns green. The light turns red. The morning traffic pauses.

As though drawn by an invisible mote of gravity, or pulled by a magnetic line of force that points south toward Boston, from seven directions a procession of coffee cups floats four-and-one-half feet above the sidewalk, looks both ways at the crosswalk, steps up 6 inches above the curb, stops at a bench, settles or hovers, waiting.

There is nothing in midnight but a fleck of ink on the otherwise empty face of the clock, or an electrical pulse which dis-integrates into a soft dash of light in an otherwise seamless river of life. We make the marks against which we measure our lives and call them time: they do not exist without our pen striking the hours and the days and the years.

Gravity explains the sands of our lives by dividing moments into falling grains of silica, whose gently wrinkled whorl descends a crystal flue, gravity which draws it through in only one direction, toward the center and to rest, toward the sea. As smooth as grains can be, still they click in quantum resonance like a smaller tick of the clock, a smaller and less useful error of the time we make, one which can never be pointed out, so never be discussed.

I looked into the mirror and found that the dust of time has softened the edges of old pains and blended the colors of old joys; as though every footstep were muffled somehow, walking through snow toward night, walking in the dust of an extinct volcano toward a summit. Everything had become quieter, from the head to the body to the heart; love had grown quieter, insisting less, and accepting less insistence. What once felt like threat now felt like old thunder, a storm that had swept the plains clean and rolled itself, complaint and all, toward the east. Where once there was the need for a father’s blessing, remained the embrace of a father’s presence.

A moment arrives and a moment passes, water through your fingers. Beautiful water: touch a drop to your lips, your thirst is lessened; touch a drop to your eyes, they are cleared; touch a drop to your forehead, you are baptized; touch a drop to the soil, the flower grows.

From the electric arc of that instant, a trail of Past streams out, like smoke from a sparkler spun through the air, or heat from a flame that burns and consumes itself as it gives light… like words on a page, a trail of markings left behind the hand, a narrative guide, a history, each word a nod to a line that began and continues to be written.

Night deepens toward its nadir, just as winter toward its coldest point. The body sleeps but the spirit is waking, as though through eyelids closed, still a subtler eye is watching. My cats have curled to sleep on my bed, caressing each other as they wash, then bundling themselves together for their rest. And around the wide world, people fall into slumber in the wake of the waning light, as though the shadow of the earth, like the soft hand of death, brushed each one gently into short oblivion, to be called to rise again by morning’s light.

A winter storm has covered our earth with snow, like the sands of a beach, but deposited by waves of wind; now the air temperature rises and sleet makes a slick glaze overall; now the sun is left behind as we spin toward the east, – whatever East is: we spin in the direction of our spin – and the temperature drops again, and the whole of her body is draped in a white sheet. I have been inside most of the day. I have worked, because wires and wireless have taken my words, in streams of zeros and ones, from the tips of my fingers to the video screens in Boston and elsewhere. I can be a hermit without isolation.

…atrás dos corpos e das mentes que nós vestimos, para ter algo tangível que podemos tocar…

We spend so much time tied up within our thoughts and our bodies, we think This is It, I am here to avoid as much discomfort as I can, here to do what this skin tells me to do, now eat, now copulate, now sleep, something unsatisfying here, got to uncover it, got to feed it, to fuck it, to put it to bed.