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We mourn the loss of one extraordinary human life: a grandmother, a cousin, a father, a friend.

Rather, I look for and love the drama in the small details particular to one person, the crooked tooth, the bitten nails, the hidden suffering. Though I studied geology, the long view of existence-our lives as minerals-is not the story I most often focus on. I just don’t often remember having been those things. Being a tree or chickadee or pile of ash is also, no doubt, extraordinary. From those times.”īeing a human is extraordinary. Toni Morrison writes, “It’s hard to make yourself die forever.” Thich Nhat Hanh says, “I have been a cloud, a river and the air.” Cristina Rivera Garza tells us, “I know you from when you were a tree. “Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing.” Our repurposed parts, like Frankenstein’s creature, are calcium, potassium, phosphorus, sodium, magnesium remixed into bodies. My arms feel stronger with the memory of the rocks that make me.īut we have been dead a long time. In the yard, I shake off enough deadness to go make dinner. I hear them speak and, as if waking, my specifics come to collect my body back into being a mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend, a woman who is alive, reading a book outside before dusk.

They jump, shriek, and pretend to be something other than their current forms. Everything is ancient, small, and eternal. All the elements my body and your body have known: a mountain boulder, sediment in the sea, an underground pebble, sand. This place where we are all intimately mixed up with one another. I catch a glimpse or scent of our dispersed worlds, this place without border, boundary, pain, or punctuation. What if I’ve been dead for a long time? What if I’ve been dead my whole life? If I am dead, the strangeness of existence is momentarily comprehensible. I’m watching the weird world, the weird birds when a thought arrives from nowhere. How did the word “weird” get so weird? And my hands, they are also weird. How did the birds get so weird? A bright red head, spiky tufts, yellow eyes, pink feet, hidden fluorescence, the ability to fly.