This is how I save my own life. Like Avalokitesvara, I listen for the cries of the world. But in my smallness, I can only listen for small things, for what’s feral.
The faint chirr of crickets; a sunfish’s slap and plop (fish as clumsy skimmed stone, dodging an egret.) Bullfrogs. A red-tailed hawk’s descending scream. And a great blue heron rising, its wings unfurling, luffing.
Image from Tashi Tobgyal's "The Inside Story: Rathole Coal Mining in the Jaintia Hills," 2012
The creosote smell of old railroad ties at the shaft’s entrance, the long slow seepage from the adit. There’s not much light— a rusty slice of moon drowning in an acid pond. My headlamp. I look and find a heap of fool’s gold has weathered, turned the water into something that’ll burn the skin off my bones. Here is nowhere, and here’s where I find myself—in a place where the scroll’s worn off the auger, dull as a stained pile of tailings.
NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran, "Junocam PeriJove 9," © CC NC SA
At a touch, I fly out past the borderland of my skin, through arcs of tropospheric blue. It takes a moment to orient. I tumble on a ghost rappel, pinwheel as home—an agate marble—shrinks behind me. Just like that, I pass Juno and Jupiter, whose storms roil so beautifully, all pearls into liquid nacre—then further, faster, so fast emptiness becomes a sound, light pouring through me. Time pools at the edge of things where things leave off their skins. Makes of us a holy, formless joy.
Caravaggio, detail from "David con la testa di Golia," 1606-07
Bellowing, enraged by the scrawny boy standing out of range, unable to see him (did the sun come out from behind a cloud?) or to see what was next: his death. Caravaggio mirrored himself, slack-mouthed and bleeding, in the giant; and I, caught in the net of a dream with Caravaggio’s Goliath raging, I was frozen, no sling at hand, waiting for my terror to pass, waiting for rescue. I woke, gasping. If I could slip back into those starlit waters and redream the terrible dream, I’d raise my right hand slowly, blur the story’s edges with abhayamudrā, then wait until the giant—heaving, anguished, broken—became a fountain of tears.
