A walk is a revelation (is a revelation)

Sunday evenings I take walks around the myriad streets of Millcreek and Canyon Rim. I wait until the sky is half blue, half orange, and the breeze from the mouth of the canyon has safely chased the sear of the sun to the far west. I put on my flat cap and jacket and set out. The houses and streets in my immediate neighborhood are nondescript and I treat them like an elongated threshold; a necessary breezeway to be passed through before entering the real world. As I amble eastward, the houses slowly turn to homes and I begin to smile at their thoughtfully simple architecture. A homemade arts and crafts door, unpainted. A perfectly pitched grey roof. Shutters. Ivy. A misplaced window above a garage - evidence of a family getting bigger than expected. And because it's Sunday, and the air is just starting to autumn, I take it as a sign of a love getting bigger than expected too. These modest and shapely houses - and the trees and curtains that make them homes - remind me each week of an alternate reality in which an alternate me lives. I see him pull into the driveway. The night is now dark and lamps shine up at the middle-aged trees in the yard. He opens the back door of the car and lifts out a sleeping child in one arm, then leans in and picks up a tiny pair of dispatched shoes with his free hand. His wife walks around the front of the car with a sleeping lump in her arms too. With ease they slip into the safety of their home. They close the door and leave the porch light on. Inside there is tiredness. And love.

As I turn back to head home - leaving alternate-reality me to get his rest for the upcoming week - I realize that I have been watching an old rerun of a dream I used to have. And in fact still have. These walks are a reminder. They are a revelation. What I want is not complicated. It is not something I need to spend endless hours philosophizing about with friends. It is not scary or unknowable. It is a simple home, hard work, and a happy family. A walk is a revelation. And the fact that a walk is a revelation is a revelation in and of itself. When what I really want seems untraceable dimensions away, all I have to do is put on my flat cap and jacket and wait for the sun to drop. And I can know just how close I am. To the home. And the sleep. And we'll walk.

9eleven

This day belongs to those who, even now, wake up every morning swimming desperately against the relentless, hydraulic sucking of grief. To those who lost a Someone. I was a witness, we all were, to the horror and the fear of that September Tuesday. To the television screens painted red and grey. To the unsettled afterdays without laughter. And in small background ways the ramifications continue to touch us all, though likely only pricking our conscience when the cold slate of an airport floor reaches our bared toes. But to those with the swallowing, to those with the emptiness that will never be filled…what can we say? We don’t know. But we know. We know that whatever loss the rest of us suffered, even if it means the loss of the Known and the Secure – even if it means the loss of Humanity itself – will never eclipse the loss of a mother’s only son, or a sister, or a brother, a mommy, a daddy, a daughter, a love. Thus is the cruel calculus of the human heart. By proxy of your fallen you are the inheritors of the right to grieve however you want. For as long as you want. May the prayers of the millions weave a net sufficient to hold the heads of you few today. God bless.