There are many middles.

Everything that touches the middle, touches each middle.

The room
The earth
Ash

On the way home from Albuquerque the Christmas before my mother died, I purchased ghost beads in Old Town and held them in my lap all the way to Denver. A small amount of snow on the fields. The desert full of small mountains. I attended to what holds us here—permanent and communicable. Each horse I saw I felt. Each tree.

I believe in the entrances to this world. How we swim excessively through like torpedo fish with prompt hearts. How we are fastened to earth. Our agricultural love for it. How the earth continues to contain us. How it is gigantic in its containment. The wild airy deserts made visible.

Mortality is singular.

There are many things in this life that we touch and of the corresponding states, there is only what we express of these things that stays in us properly, waiting for the future, like packed down snow we glide effortlessly across.

The first year I lived in Colorado, I photographed the sky from the same location each morning at 8:00.

The place where I stood to photograph the sky was in between two brick apartment buildings. Nothing existed in this space except for grass, a view of the sky, and, if you looked forward, a street with parked cars and an empty parking lot behind it.

I can’t remember what I was trying to learn by doing this, but it became a meditation on the expressability of light because that was what most noticeably changed throughout the year.

The light began to express the things I looked for.

I grew up in a small home near woods and on holidays, or after big meals, we would walk there.

In winter, the branches of the oaks and maples froze. The work had moved underground, where the roots diligently waited.

The things I searched for then, I don’t now—messages, buried objects—

I feel like I’m full of weather.

I can only picture myself as I was then as I am now being who I was then.

I’m not surprised that people die.

Each person is her own hive.

I’m learning to take consciousness as an astonishing phenomenon, explained only by the location in which it occurs.

I don’t think this is outrageous, but I try to imagine that it is. I try to imagine everything as only external—all our processes and thoughts, our senses and understanding, each recognition of a face, each image of a neighborhood, the Midwest, other people’s pulses from a long time ago, the hidden animals that exist and the ones that don’t, imperialism, bias, what is dead and what will come to be so.