Just the stream
I.
A stream. The thing observing is also just the stream. How can that be?
[notebook entry dated November 25, 2018]
II.
I finished polishing a plate and set it down on the pile. Picking up another, I went at it with the damp towel. Without taking my eyes from the plate, I resumed my conversation with Jeremy.
“Continuing the blog will be a challenge here,” I said.
“Why, because there’s nothing happening?” He said it right on the tail of what I’d said, not missing a beat — as though he’d already considered this particular challenge. The traveler writing a travel blog suddenly stays put for a bit. Seems pretty obvious, I guess.
He picked up another plate as I put mine down.
“Well, no, not really… there’s plenty I could write about. It’s just that now I’ve got people who might be reading it who work and live here. So I guess it makes it tough, and kind of awkward, to write about a lot of things.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, in a distinctly Kiwi accent — the yes sounding like yees to my ears. (To be fair, all my lines are delivered in a thick American accent.)
Then he added, “Unless you just write about the people who you know can’t read.” He said it flatly, as always, with no indication that he was joking except the way he paused and looked at me — his signal.
And I think, There’s nothing happening here?
III.
Life is a stream—and sure, you can let it carry you along from place to place. That’s one way to experience life’s happening. Or you can set yourself down like a rock in the middle of the current, watch the water pool around you, witness it in all its eddies where the water trips back on itself. Another way to see shit happen.
I’ve experienced it both ways. Over the last few months, until now, I’ve just been carried along with the flow—from quitting my job in Seattle, to traveling down through old stomping grounds in Utah, to seeing my family in Arizona, to living in hostels and traveling by campervan in New Zealand. I’ve been carried by the current from place to place, experience to experience.
Then I saw a job opportunity at a hotel in the mountains and I went for it. I parked my van, moved into newly built staff accommodation, and donned an apron at a buffet.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t still feel the current. Maybe I feel it stronger. All that rushing force that took me from Seattle to here is still behind me, at times flowing around, at other times building up behind me, never letting me forget that things will keep moving, that time doesn’t stop, that every breath, whether I like it or not, is inexorably taking me closer to my last.
And when I get home from the buffet after a night shift, when I walk in the door, slip off my shoes, and drop onto the couch, when no one else is awake—before I do anything, I just sit and stare listlessly. With no one to talk to and nothing to see, I find myself watching my thoughts, which so frequently are like rapids tumbling and crashing, now pooling out around me, spreading out to where one only barely touches another, and I float among them.
And just when the sediment starts to settle, I open my notebook, click my pen, and make some scratches on paper. I stir it all up again.
IV.
Riley’s off to commercial fish.
“If I had a tough bone in my body, I’d go too,” I told him. Or something like that.
[entry in notebook dated November 25, 2018]
V.
“So I hear you’re writing a book?” She said it as she rushed from one thing to another, preparing for another flood of hungry tourists. But I can’t tell you if it was a statement or a question. My punctuation is purely conjecture.
“Yeah,” I said. But who told you?
I haven’t been exactly tight-lipped about it. Some people are here to make and save money (not anywhere to spend it really), others are here for the national park and its hikes, and then there’s me, here to write a goddamn novel. I figured I might be able to do it with the lack of distractions up here in the mountains.
It’s not fair to say I’m writing a book, though. Because I’m not. I just intend to. I’ve got it all mapped out. In fact, when I first got the idea to write the thing, I sent the following schedule to my brother Zack (since, you know, he’s written a couple of novels himself):
So, according to the timeline, I won’t actually be writing a book until January. Until then, I’m just in what I term “development phase.”
Like a dam with a river rising up behind it.
At least that’s the idea.
VI.
My mind appears a tangle of things, tightly wound. It’s like I can feel the constriction — how one thought necessitates the next.
And I wonder if that’s all consciousness is — a tight bundle of awareness and perception. What happens if you encourage it to unwind?
We’re each a node, a bundle, a knot in the field.
[entry in notebook dates November 25, 2018]
VII.
One of my friends here told me that he’d been a habitual pot smoker since he was 15. Only very recently, he said, had he spent any real length of time sober (from cannabis, anyway).
He told me that when, after a few months of sobriety, he went back to smoking, it was like he was coming down from a trip — the trip being all that time he spent not smoking.
VIII.
Stick with me on this for a second. I’m not sure I can get it all out or that it makes any sense anyway, but I’m gonna give it a try.
The universe is just doing its thing: happening. Stars are igniting and collapsing, space-time fabric is expanding, water is lapping and crashing, Planck-sized strings are curling up into dimensions we can’t even detect, leaves are turning colors, cats are marking territory, and photons are waving and particle-ing across it all.
You and I perceive all of this happening as one thing after another. One, one moment; another, the next. And so we call it cause and effect. That magma spewing caused the islands of Hawaii. The change of the seasons caused those leaves to turn. And that really huge bang caused everything to happen as we now see it.
But that’s what you and I perceive. Because the neurons in our head keep this trace of happened things. We’re here perceiving a bunch of happenings and collecting the traces in our head. We call ’em memories. With these memories, these traces, we develop a timeline. That happened before this. And from there it’s a short jump to looking for patterns — what follows what, what causes what.
Thus, with our minds, we bring continuity to chaos. Our consciousness stitches together the happenings of the universe, and therein we find a tenuous comfort.
But what happens if we strip away our consciousness? What if we just jettison the memory? The universe as we know it falls apart. Order disappears, replaced with a constant now that is always as fresh and totally confusing and unknowable as the last. We live in an ever-present shock and awe and delirium. Continuity a thing never dreamed of. Each moment and each happening completely independent and free and whole.
The universe coming unstitched with no mind to time it and tame it.
That’s one way to think of it, I suppose.
IX.
Couple with most interesting buffet eating style — bring the buffet to their own table! (Tons of sauces, multiple heaping plates to pick from… very leisurely! Get up once then sit the rest of the night.)
[undated notebook entry]
Things to look at…
In Place explores what it’s like to be in this place, Aotearoa New Zealand — and what it means to be in place more generally, what it means to belong. For more posts, visit https://medium.com/in-place.
