Title: "The Reliable Presence Beneath All Our Distracted Looking"
Lead-in:
The radicle spiritual band wasn't a band at all—it was the way four strangers kept returning to the same shore despite their annoyances, their distractions, their reasonable excuses to be elsewhere, and Marie knew it the morning her kiln timer broke and she had to feel the firing in her bones, while Herb discovered his landlord had been leaving notes about noise that didn't exist, while Nell's supplier delivered wrong ingredients that turned out to be exactly right, while Jean's tooth began its small rebellion against the song that needed writing.
The Story:
During a kayak trip paddling to Nokomis—
Morning traffic. Already thick. Already tired.
But the trip kept paddling itself through Marie's memory.
Three weeks ago.
Three weeks forward.
Time doing that thing it does when something important happens but you don't know it's important until the reliable presence beneath all your distracted looking finally—
Finally what?
*
Phone buzzing. Ignored. Buzzing again.
Distracted by other annoyances—
Marie counted them like rosary beads:
The kiln that wouldn't hold temperature.
The clay shipment arriving wet.
Her daughter texting about money about worry about things that would solve themselves if everyone could just—
Breathe?
*
But beneath the annoyances.
That reliable presence.
Like bedrock under sand. Like the thing that holds the shore while waves keep insisting on change.
*
Neighbor's television. Too loud. Always too loud.
Herb had started a list:
"Things That Interrupt the Sacred"
Then crossed it out.
Started another:
"The Sacred That Interrupts Things"
Then realized they were the same list.
*
We didn't really know what its reliable presence was pre interpersonal contact—
Coffee maker gurgling. Almost done. Almost.
Before they'd met—no.
They hadn't met.
Not in the way meeting usually means. But that day at Nokomis, when four strangers stood at the same shore without speaking, something had—
Conjugated?
Was that the word?
Like verbs agreeing in languages none of them spoke but all of them were speaking.
*
Delivery truck. Backing up. That insistent beep.
Nell understood through burnt onions.
She'd been distracted. Thinking about the lake. About that moment when calm maple leaves flickering pictures gradually became more lucid in our minds—
The onions turned to carbon.
But carbon is just earth returning to itself.
And the burnt smell, that bitter teaching, it was saying something about transformation that recipes never mention:
Sometimes the burning is the point.
*
Wind through a cracked window. Almost music.
Jean's tooth pulsed with the memory.
Our radicle spiritual band asked us to write a song about this—
Radicle.
Not radical.
Radicle—the first root. The embryonic beginning. The part that knows which way is down before there's an up to compare it to.
*
Children arguing. Then laughing. Then both.
The band that wasn't a band.
The spiritual that wasn't separate from the ordinary.
The request that wasn't really a request but a recognition:
This needs a song.
*
When we went to the pine standing cedar woven path at the beach water's edge—
Dishes clattering. Someone's morning routine.
Marie felt it first in her wrists.
That specific ache that meant she'd been working clay without working clay. Her body making vessels in sleep. In distraction. In the space between one annoyance and the next where the reliable presence lives.
Herb wrote it on his window again.
This time in dust.
So it would last longer than steam.
But dust doesn't last either.
Nothing lasts.
Everything lasts.
Both at once—
*
Dog barking. Not angry. Conversational.
From behind our middle eye outside window to soul—
The window wasn't clean.
Never had been.
Covered with fingerprints of everyone who'd tried to see through. Smudged with trying. With failing. With trying again.
But the smudges were part of the seeing.
The dirt was the teaching.
The unclear was the only clarity worth—
*
Affected.
Siren passing. Doppler effect. Physics made audible.
Not effected with an 'e'.
Affected with an 'a'.
The difference mattered. One meant caused. One meant touched-but-not-changed-but-yes-changed-but-still-yourself-but-different.
The grammar teachers would say it's about subject and object.
But what if you're both?
What if you're neither?
*
Microwave beeping. Someone's reheating coffee.
We had not considered this kind of vision before—
Nell added salt to the burnt onion pan.
Salt to carbon.
Sea to earth.
The old combinations that knew themselves before humans knew cooking. When everything was just minerals teaching minerals about heat.
*
Now we know it as the original Mini Haha lava flats—
Construction somewhere. Hammering. Building or destroying. Same sound.
Jean's tooth had stopped hurting.
But the absence of pain was louder than the pain had been.
Like silence after thunder.
Like the space where a note should be but isn't but the isn't is the note.
*
That over centuries became lush green, curved black soil mounds—
Marie understood through her broken kiln timer.
Time wasn't reliable.
But presence was.
The clay would tell her when it was ready. Had always told her. The timer had been the distraction. The breakdown was the gift.
*
Someone practicing piano. Scales. Repetitive. Necessary.
Seeds of local flowers after many visits we came more rooted us—
The grammar broke exactly where Jean's tooth had ached.
Where Herb's words had failed.
Where Nell's onions had burned.
Where Marie's timer had stopped.
The breaking was the rooting.
The rooting was the returning.
The returning was the song their radicle spiritual band needed.
*
Birds. Different kinds. Not agreeing on anything.
We were haunted by this type of honest strong and gentle beauty—
But haunted meant inhabited.
Meant carrying.
Meant the reliable presence had taken up residence in the space between their ribs where breathing happens where unbreathing waits where the song that needs writing lives before it's written.
*
Thunder. Far off. Maybe coming. Maybe going.
Distracted by other annoyances—
The list grew:
Parking tickets.
Burnt coffee.
Meetings about meetings.
The neighbor's music.
The tooth that aches.
The clay that cracks.
The words that fail.
The onions that burn.
But each annoyance was a door.
Each distraction was direction.
Each interruption was the reliable presence saying:
Pay attention.
Not to this.
Through this.
To what doesn't change when everything changes.
*
Rain starting. Light. Like typing.
Our radicle spiritual band—
Was the four of them.
Was the shore.
Was the trees.
Was the lava sleeping under everything.
Was the pressure ghosts dancing in clay in words in food in song.
Was asking for a song that was already being sung.
*
Clock ticking. Just noticed it. Always been there.
Pre interpersonal contact—
Before the meeting that wasn't a meeting.
Before the recognition that wasn't recognition.
When they were just four people living their distracted lives, dealing with their various annoyances, not knowing they were already connected by the reliable presence that runs under everything like mycelium like water table like the old lava teaching soil how to remember fire.
*
Everything quiet suddenly. Even the traffic.
They would write the song.
Not with words—words were Herb's beautiful failures.
Not with notes—notes were Jean's absent presences.
Not with food—food was Nell's transformed transformations.
Not with clay—clay was Marie's pressure made visible.
But with the spaces between.
With the reliable presence.
With the thing that continues when everything else stops.
*
Wind chime. Once. Waiting for wind to continue.
We were and continue to forever be Mother Earth students—
*
The song was already written.
In lava.
In soil.
In the patient argument between shore and water.
In the way four strangers can stand at the same place and know the same thing without knowing they know.
*
Evening birds. Different from morning birds. Same sky.
The annoyances continued.
Would always continue.
But now they knew:
The interruptions were the song.
The distractions were the teaching.
The broken things were the openings.
The reliable presence was what remained when you stopped trying to see it.
When you let it see you.
When you became the seeing.
*
Crickets tuning up. The night orchestra.
Their radicle spiritual band played on.
In broken kilns.
In burnt onions.
In failed words.
In aching teeth.
In all the ways the sacred hides in annoyance.
In all the ways presence continues beneath distraction.
*
Owl calling. No answer. Calling anyway.
The song they were asked to write.
Was writing them.
Had always been writing them.
Would continue writing them.
Even when they couldn't hear it.
Especially then.
*
Lake breathing. Reliable. Present.
Forever students.
Forever studied.
Forever the studying itself.
Forever the song that sings the singer.
Forever the reliable presence beneath.
*
All our distracted looking.
*
Almost silence.
*
Almost.
*
The presence that remains.
*
Reliable.
*
Always—
