Declaration of being.

I am well-formed.
Consider my limbs:
they are legs with feet and toes,
and if they were broken or missing,
still I'd be well-formed.
And my arms. I have two, with hands and fingers,
and if I had one arm or no fingers, still I'd be well-formed.
And my head is definitely head-shaped,
and I am reasonably sure there is a brain in there.
It pumps thoughts and signals, it sends and receives,
and it moves the arms and legs and keeps me living.
If my brain was half a brain or my head
had indentations, still I'd be well-formed, for
I excel at this, being a person.
And you and you and you do, too, we all do.
No one fails at being a person.

And still, and yet,
the number on the scale, the hair I must remove,
the clothes I must wear, the shoes,
my ruddy skin, the age spot,
the glasses that slip down my nose
the sweat seeps through my dress
the throbbing ankle
the aching tired
the

the

ugly humanness of me

is all I see.

Consider beauty:
Burnished limbs, long and lean,
straight rows of white teeth, the perpetual smile,
the eyes that never look tired.
The beautiful dress, the flawless accessories.

I am not that beauty.
But I am.

I am

this beauty

:::

(This was inspired by a line from Neil Gaiman's book, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. A character says to another something like -- or maybe exactly -- "No one fails at being a person." And it really stayed with me. Clearly.)

What a world.

The ribbon snake looked so pretty swimming through the water, my daughter tells me. She waits for me to respond. I hadn't seen it, actually, but I immediately got a picture in my head: the thick, marshy water dotted with green algae, the ghostly-white snapping turtle fading in and out of sight in the dark depths, and the ribbon snake, with its bright yellow stripes, waving rapidly through the green algae.

"Mmm-hmm," I agree absently. How remarkable, I am thinking, that a full 24-hours later, a day filled with heat and hiking, raptor sightings and baby alligators and green tree frogs, it is the image of the snake sluicing through the water that has stuck with her. When she reflects on her memories of the weekend, it is that sinuous winding that surfaces. How remarkable, I am thinking, that my daughter can recognize the beauty in that.

///


For some reason, it was the old farmhouse that floored me. I could feel it building past the white snake and the hawks swooping in the aviary. It was definitely surging when I scoured the green bog for a sign of an alligator. Water burbled here and there and the water swirled in satisfying patterns through the algae. We didn't see an alligator, but it felt like enough, the searching for one. The mere idea that we were in an area where alligators lurked -- that one could surface at any moment. At the interpretive building, an old woman knitted lace and talked to Wayland about her own grandmother. This old woman, what a delight, knitting among the aquariums around her -- baby alligators and softshell turtles and frogs and snakes all slow and resting after mealtime. These were all wonderful.

But as we walked past the overripe vegetable garden and the pond with boats stacked to the side, we saw the house: light blue, surrounded by an old wooden fence with bits of vines and purple flower bursting through, I could not contain myself. The gently decaying house filled with books dating back to the 1920s and daguerreotype photos and a typewriter that made the air tremble in want for the sound of clacking keys.

Such wonder.

We left the house and came upon a trail that led to bison resting against a chain-link fence. As we watched, one leaned into a tree a chuffed and snorted as it scratched its neck against the bark. It huffed, it's obsidian eyes trained on us, nostrils flaring. Its head was as big as my torso, its eyes so soft and unfathomable.

///

Her bracelets catch the sun as she climbs the wooden rail surrounding the swampy overlook, hoping to catch a glimpse of an alligator gliding in the murky depths. Her hair dips forward, braided with light and warmth. Her skirt floats around her legs. Madeleine has run ahead, tired of looking for alligators, but Violet is entranced and settled. We are quiet for a long moment.

"What's that?" I ask, and point to a spot in the water that's swirling through the green, seemingly separate from the wind's gentle push. Bubbles rise to the surface. "Is something in there?"

Violet leaps back from her perch and climbs up next to me, so she can get a better view. We watch the bubbles, the swirls. I begin to think it's nothing, but Violet is sure. "I bet it's an alligator," she says. "That's got to be an alligator."

///

On the drive home from the trip, I read the wikipedia entry for nihilism out loud to my husband. The long road from Houston to home stretches on and on. It is hot and we're tired and we're working against the clock as it's Sunday and we both have work in the morning.

We read about Neitzsche and Kierkegaard and moral nihilism and Wayland says he pretty much agrees with nihilism. That the world is without meaning, that there is no universal truth. That we are all bound by our own perspectives.

I am against it immediately, but it's a gut reaction. I want to say that the search for meaning is what gives life meaning. That it's something we all do, every single one of us, from the moment we're born. That when we're babies, we work with what we have: our mothers and our fathers and the immediate comfort of food and unconditional love. As we grow and the world gets larger, meaning grows with it. We find meaning everywhere. We find meaning without trying. The drug addict searches for meaning and finds it there in drugs -- though that is empty and unstable -- the deeply religious person looks for meaning and finds it in God -- which can be as deep and consistent as anything else.

And if it's the search for meaning that's universal, then what a world we live in. A veritable playground of things surround us everyday that can give depth and texture and purpose to our lives. This pad of paper. This keyboard. The words, always the words. And that day that Wayland and I had our discussion about nihilism, how fitting that we spent the day the way that we did. The bison's eyes, the old keyboard, the burbling swirls of water in the marsh, the slender curve of a snake furrowing through water.