immanence

I’ve sometimes imagined

I would throw a big party when I turn sixty, the kind of party I used to throw in my twenties, when there was plenty to celebrate and plenty of people to celebrate with. (One of those was the ‘End of the World party’, which tells you the kinds of things we celebrated back in the 1980s.)

’60’ is a big, round number, the soft kind you can cuddle up to, and there’d be plenty of things I would have to celebrate by then — good health, professional success, loved ones who’ve stuck with me (and me with them), places I think of as home (at least two, at this point in my life).

Most of all, experiences — things I’ve seen, places I’ve been, musics I’ve heard, realizations that have landed on me like birds alighting on the wisps of morning when I woke up from dreams as lucid as oncoming headlights on a stormy road at night, as tangled as seaweed.

And the people who’ve been part of those experiences. I couldn’t invite more than a handful of them, and most are nowhere near, but I could at least celebrate them as the people by whom this person turning sixty has been defined as this person at this moment, this wave washing itself on this shoreline at t h i s v e r y s e c o n d .

Like Roy Batty

I can recount things I’ve seen that I wouldn’t have believed

I’ve seen a leopard scrambling up a tree outside Kruger to devour its prey, hanging from its mouth, while jackals circled round below

I’ve watched a thousand dolphins dancing in the wake of a boat ferrying from the Channel Islands, and a tapir the size of a lion sleeping in the forests of Corcovado

I’ve climbed buttes and mesas, tors and temples, and bathed in the hot volcanic pools of Furnas atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge

I’ve taken a wrong turn down from XiangShan peak in Taipei, only to find myself stunned and gaping at the face of a god the size of a small cathedral behind whom a monastery complex spread out deserted and open to a lone visitor, as if in a dream

I’ve sat atop the Tor in Glastonbury wrapped in a friend’s blanket like a robe on a misty solstice dawn, bell-tower behind me and sleepy town below, ocean of grey all around, and understood that conflicts swirl over symbol and space, heroes and gods, vortices of human imagining, while earth and sky meet here in this eye of the storm in the speechless dew of morning

I’ve attended the Festival, danced around bonfires the height of mammoths to drums like volcanoes, and awakened in the steppes of southern Ukraine from a soma-induced blizzard of light and darkness zipping through my body electrical for hours upon hours in the arms of one who understood only that something was happening that needed to take its time

I’ve stood on the banks of the ocean’s immensity in Big Sur, Haida Gwaii, the Osa Peninsula, in Maine and the Yucatan, Inishmaan, and the coast of KwaZulu-Natal. I’ve listened, eyes closed, to the voice of this cosmos as she cast her army of liquid metal in a great sweeping motion against an endless shoreline, the low, thunderous crash of each wave and the sudden “sssshhhhhhh…” as the water receded back over millions of pebbles shuffling down beneath its movement, sssssshhhhhhhhhhhh to the left and sssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh to the right, swooshing and sliding from big bang to big bang, breaths heaving and sighing and always this motion, answering to no one but itself, blind, eternal

I’ve held our not yet named newborn in my nervous hands as he first opened his eyes, dizzy, tearful, having just emerged from a convulsive trial of hours upon hours that felt like an eternity

I’ve loved, and been loved, and will continue to love across canyons of uncertainty

“Those moments… like tears in rain,” they’re to celebrate

Instead I

am quarantining and avoiding people, every one of them, to keep from vectoring BA.5, the “reinfection wave” that’s targeting thirty million of my fellow citizens over the next few months, to hit them harder than they were thinking it could.

The soft intruder slinks nearby, somewhere in the darkness, patiently, stealthily looking for cracks to seep into. He, or She, or They I think I’ll call Them, have mostly finished Their work with me. I breathe clearly now, unimpeded, and await a negative result.

I have given Them time (eighteen days), knowing that I too have time, body time, time to recover and heal and watch Them depart, slowly skulking away to look for someone else’s open window at night.

As for the party, there’s always eighty. An even softer, rounder, more eternal number. Or 88. That will do it. That’ll teach Them how long I can wait.

Those Covid sorts, they’ll be back in new disguises by then. So will we, if we have the patience to stay with ourselves.

Tomorrow I intend to test negative. My first post-Covid birthday, where post means in the wake of. In the experience of. In the carnal knowledge of.

So we celebrate our survival.

The real party begins when one recognizes how one is nothing without others.

My parents lost their homes and part of their lives in a war, but not their hopes and dreams. They started in a new country and worked days and nights so that we, their kids, wouldn’t have to. That country gave me education, years and years of it, asking little in return. (Canada, if you have to ask.) And all those who taught me, who guided me, who believed in me and vouched for me, who loved me, supported me, listened to me, explored with me, and even married me (well, in one case, and she fits all those categories). They know who they are, and it’s my birthday, but it comes only because of all of them. They are all my family.

Here’s to everyone.