Orbits

This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: Small wins (part 2). The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.

James’s house in the Hudson Valley is surrounded by a four-acre chaos of trees—towering pines, teenage maples. We’re in New York’s 18th congressional district, which is as close to 50-50 as you’ll find in these United States, and that indecision seems to extend to the geography itself: Is this a low-density suburb, a self-contained town, the country, or the wilderness? It’s pretty common around here to clear the land for an enormous lawn, even some light agriculture; when I go running, many houses are visible from the road even if they’re set back a fair bit, and guarded by a goat. But at James’s we’re in a haven, a cloister, invisible in summertime to almost anyone who isn’t already here. There is a lawn, but it’s enclosed, more appendage of the house than encroachment of the land. In July the fireflies bob and crow in their own private volume of black.

Now the trees are changing and starting to shed, as they were this time 25 years ago, when my mom and I came east to tour a handful of colleges. The city (which I was seeing for the first time) was under a bone-chilling cold snap, I remember, a contrast to today’s 81 degrees. Another difference then was the absence of any way to find a place to stay other than driving up to it and seeing if it had vacancy; again and again, the Courtyards and the Hampton Inns along Interstate 95, jammed up with leaf-chasers, didn’t.

We did eventually find lodging, but even so, in the end I wound up at a campus I’d never laid eyes on in southern California. Life is orbital in its recurrence of themes, people, injuries, and fascinations. But that transition toward college was still a dislodging, the beginning of a decisive shift—if not the end of the old orbits, their realignment and their reclassification. And so this year has often felt.

But the earth has swung its orbit only twice, plus a few days, since I wrote the animating theory of this newsletter, which I bring to you again because each orbit has further affirmed it:

We’re embodied beings. This is the most surprising and sacred thing about us. When we think that our physical experience is separate from our psychic one, we’re cradling an illusion. All action, all thought, all experience, all purpose, all relationship, and all creation are the work of the body. And while some broader consciousness out there might be more durable, we ourselves don’t get forever. Thus it is our obligation, our gift, to invent our way through the unfavorable conditions which, until the day we die, will manage to surround us. If we don’t make it the purpose of our lives to create—on the page, on the piano bench, across the pillow from our lover, in the quiet counsel we give to our colleagues, in the swimming pool, upon the mountain—it doesn’t mean we’re bad or that we failed: “You don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you,” Mr. Rogers said. (Write that somewhere in permanent ink.) But it does mean that our experience wasn’t as large or as full or as true as it could have been. I wish to avoid this fate, and I wish for you to avoid it, and that is why we are here.

It seems self-evident, doesn’t it, that what has happened had happened by the time that all got written down? What I’m reading might be to blame, but I almost can’t imagine otherwise.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram.