am I the idiot?

I’ve just run down from my third-floor walk-up this Sunday morning to see if the street by the church next door has turned into a no-parking zone. No phone, just keys. A bra hastily slung on, but basically I’m still in my loungewear. I see no sign of temporary parking bans. I don’t even see my car. I turn toward the next most likely place I would have parked and yes, there’s my Honda, a few cars down on Judson–and ah, there's the lake! The hot coffee I meant to get right back to can wait. 

Within minutes I’m in the sand. I set down my Birks by the lifeguard tower. Cold sand on the soles of the feet telegraphs a different kind of aliveness than hot. It’s wetsuit-cold out, early October, and people are actually in them: the only other humans on the beach have gathered, apparently, to brace their bodies in what I imagine is a stunning immersion of a swim. A few of them must be friends, spouses, supporters of the bold, wetsuited ones. Dressed like I am, in slightly too few layers for the morning air, they’re setting out blankets and breakfast. 

I walk half the beach barefoot, the other half sandal-clad again. Two tall women are standing at the far end talking as I approach, and I gauge whether to walk between them and the water or to go round. There’s plenty of room to pass by the water. We smile and greet each other. I see that the younger of the two–maybe forty, long, red hair pulled back in a ponytail–has been crying. But she smiles now, the kind of relaxed, crumpled smile that only a good cry can bring on. 

  –I can’t believe I just told you my life story.

  –I’m really glad you did. 

The two turn back toward the group and move slowly down the sand. The older woman, the listener, who has dressed for the weather in a long winter coat and hat already, shares some words as she walks. She watches the stones roll up with the waves and bends to retrieve a beauty or two. When they reach the group a woman sings out,

  –Hey, Laura! I brought brownies! They’re vegan but they’re not gluten-free!

And Laura of the long coat and hat laughs and says,

  –I’ll take whatever you’re offering.

* * *

I’ve returned home from the beach with a beautiful stone of my own. 

I’ve just been rereading Sand Talk, Tyson Yunkaporta’s collection of yarns and thought experiments and insights around indigenous thinking. When I read his writing it makes me fall apart with a kind of deep recognition, and it also blasts my brain and body with aliveness and perplexity. I think I am indigenous I wish I were indigenous we’re meant to be indigenous is one whole level of my take-away. 

I don’t stay there, though. I am just indigenous-wise enough to see the futility in polarity thinking, and to see that we’re all one great big humming organism, on our way somewhere together by dint of variety and contrast. And bringing home a stone today, uplifting it from its home, is another kind of take-away. 

The stone is alive: this, I know. Writing a graduate thesis years ago on the use of voice in Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, I found I couldn’t comply with my thesis advisor’s hard press in favor of inserting the fuzzy, conjunctive–“‘It was as if’ the trillium had consciousness.” I just left it at the fact: a plant knows. 

Tyson talks about stones taken home as souvenirs from the sacred Australian site of Uluru (all sites are sacred), only to be shipped back by the takers, desperate to undo the bad luck they’ve brought upon themselves. He talks about the need to learn, by way of respect, which stones it’s ok to move. He talks about idiots.

I sense that this stone has something to teach me. I think it conspired to drag me out the door this morning to check on the status of my parked car and then pivot. It has something to do with the compassion and grace that flowed as I walked the beach. It’s beautiful.

The heat in my apartment kicked on about a week ago. The building is ninety-six years old, with great big painted radiators, the kind whose hiss and clank I have always loved. I’m sitting at the warmest end of my flat, where, with south-facing windows, the light and the extra heat stream in, even on a cold day. The stone is sitting beside me. Late into the afternoon, every time I pick it up, it is still every bit as cold as the icy water I plucked it from. 

Am I the idiot? 

* * *

Perhaps not. 

Maybe not–maybe

not if I am willing to let the whole lake in, too.

Not if I am willing to let all the sand along all the shores of Lake Michigan in, 

and all the stones, too, and the land beyond the sand and stones, out and out 

until that land drags all the other Greats washing into my apartment with it, 

and Canada and fish and the Hudson, the Bering and the Americas, the oceans 

and their islands, their far shores and all the land dances and all the water songs 

and all the sentient and all the suffering in all the hemi-demi-spheres of the Gaia, 

until Uluru and all its formidable stones tumble in too, and the stone and I arrive everywhere and nowhere together at once, indistinguishable one from all. 

Maybe coming home with that beautiful stone–definitely not my own–

has to do only partly with compassion and grace. 

Maybe it has to do mainly with inviting annihilation. 

Into. 

By way of respect.