Directives To Self

In the spring--next time it comes around--go to the pond one bright midday and look for the swarms of new tadpoles, the ones that are like loose commas or spattered ink blots just beneath the surface of the water. You used to do this as a child, you remember the muck-smell and the impossibly gentle touch of twenty or thirty wriggling bodies in your palm, the cool water, the smells of life and death. When was the last time you did this? Feels like forever.

Then, it's been forever.

You also need to lay down in the grass before the snow gets here. Just fall onto the grass and let the earth clutch you as it spins. Feel the orbit, the almost unimaginable sweep of rotation, in your soul, the awesome faint rushing that is like being born across the snowfield on your father's back, or in your mother's arms, or pulled in the sled with your infant brother toward your grandparents' old home at twilight.

These are requirements. You cannot continue forward until you go this far back. At last you've reached the age where there are things you have not done in recent memory. The age where you find what you forgot you had.