When I first planned this trip to visit my kids in the States, I thought of dropping by to see my “spiritual brother” Bruce Davidson. Together with his partner Linda Reimer, and the gathered companions at Sirius Community, he had been carrying an inner light for decades, even through the past few years of declining physical health, after a fall from a tree had physically broken him.

He passed in November, and my desire to meet him again in this lifetime were ended as well. Since Sirius is not far from the Pioneer Valley, where both of my adult children are in residence, I took an evening to drive up into the hills, to add my presence to his lingering presence.

When the sun rises the wind rises, mostly from the sea slightly acrid and full of the tide, sometimes from the land laden with dust and a broad swath of heat, in either direction pouring into and over Barcelona, east-to-west or west-to-east, breathing in or breathing out.

At street level there are pedestrians and cars, the pungent aroma of century-old sewers, the sycamores’ daily fall of leaves, and still air. Walk up a couple of flights, and the atmosphere lifts with you, tourism gives way to neighborhood (Sr. Carles and his little dog on the second floor, the acid-rock teen on the third, the divorcée and her daughters on the fourth, the colombiana next door). You meet them at the door of the tiny elevator, where they smile and wave and turn away to walk down to the street; you meet them with their bags and boxes and baby strollers, with their garbage bags and umbrellas; and you meet them in their quiet or loud domesticity, the bellowed phone calls to hard-of-hearing relatives, a raucous chorus of feliç aniversari to a friend or family member, the deep silence of all these families sleeping during a personally restless night.

Every day I want to write a poem to you but every day I swallow my song

then every day a small bird rests and every day a shaft of sunlight brightens him why not be alive? and right now? every day he takes a little breath there at the height of the eastern window and every day my song is in his voice and your voice is in my song

“I don’t see it…!”

“Shh. Just wait.”

The trail they were walking had opened onto a field, out from under heavy-scented pine boughs that dimmed the daylight and hushed the world, from depths to shallows like a river flows into a lake. The change had been so sudden that for a moment the sun had blinded them and, while their eyes were turned down, she saw it. He hadn’t.

She was taller, and years had trained her eyes to look for hidden things. He was four, with much still hidden from him and waiting to be found. She leaned down behind him until her cheek rested against his head, her lips brushing his ear. She nestled her arm against his shoulder, and pointed so that his sight might follow her finger.

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

There are innumerable anecdotes regarding the paradox of the straight line - even modern physics has brought forward a brighter sun, which casts a shadow where Euclid (preferably) would have none. The concept that I am backing into – leaving the paragraph’s position statement back-to-front, and rather than simply telling you what this is all about, suggesting what it is instead, by wandering in oblique circles ‘round the real garden, whose flowers are blooming all over the Universe, while a visitor stands inside-out within a small brick cubicle, before a mind-sized door, holding a mind-sized key (hand won’t tell the mind it’s been there all along, will it?), imagine feeling a visitor in one’s own universe, with the bricks of imagination cemented all about, keeping the garden out of sight – is this: sometimes the easy way is quite the poorest way, however you or others might convince you otherwise.

The earth turned toward the sun at the same speed as always, but this morning the sun was veiled behind a curtain of cloud, which moved slowly west over the water toward our small patch of land.

So the eye of the day – in Bahasa Indonesia, the sun is mata hari, quite literally the eye of the day, a beautiful image made language, that the day looks down upon us with warm companionship – the eye of the day opened on the northeastern coast of Massachusetts a little later than usual, as though cresting a second horizon, a lovely late false sunrise above what appeared to be mountains, mountains which had appeared overnight.