Leaving

Felton, Pennsylvania

Dear A—,

Today my sister left with her friend to go riding (in Montana?) I still don’t know where. They will be traveling with their truck (Big Mama), their blue heeler Breeze, 50 gallon barrel of biodiesel, ten bails of hay, and also a blue trailer with three horses. My friends who were helping my dad and myself shingle our roof are leaving as well to return to North Carolina, but, the more I was thinking about it, it occurred to me that I too was leaving today.

Last night L— and I had a nice long talk after everyone had went to bed and it wasn’t so much a conversation as it was a series of studied interruptions of silence and not so much the content of our words as it was the process of making offerings to each other. He gave me a book and a shirt, Blood Meridian the book, and a T-shirt that says I (heart) NY, both of which are tokens that I will be essential to my survival “out there.” In the coming weeks, I will be spending time gathering other such impractical but necessary items. I am going to Asia to live not merely survive, and so my suitcase is being packed by books, sheet music, and dress shirts.

I stood outside last night and I felt how the damp had lifted from the rainy day. The rain had lifted earlier that day enough that we were able to throw a baseball until it got lost in the woods. I went to look for it but only saw the owl launching itself from the wet ground majestically, seeming to not care at all if I looked. Now the night was cool and only the pale horizon I could glimpse through the black, heavy trees and it was flickering like a light bulb adjusting intensity due to the agitated and confused nature of the rainy heat that had moved on. The silence was filled with the breath of leaves, the scratchings of certain things, the hootings of other things—as is the silence customarily filled with noises here in Pennsylvania and filled not so much with calls but with the myriad responses that penetrate into and then create their own pathos of a complex and complete and utterly calm reality. I think this is what German, French, and English philosophers and poets have anxiously ascribed as “nature” for the last several centuries. The only patch of sky I could see was the big dipper like seven diamonds floating in the sky.

A— today I am leaving as well. Although I will live in this house for ten more days, they are numbered and my hours will be filled with the tedious and important task of anticipating my travels and as there are no longer the days working in the sun and no longer the house full of friends to distract me or share these left over beers with I will spend these days in Taiwan and Ladakh. I will see you there, A—.