I thought it was appropriate to be reading about Smithson’s sites/non-sites in a place that is all too full of American history, that still has sand on the floor of a small, crouched building once used to house slave families. And now the farm is used to grow feed grains, which livestock can’t actually digest or assimilate properly, but damn does it make a burger. Earlier that day I had accidentally watched a fly die while I sat on the toilet, peeing. I flipped its body over to see if it could get going, but it did not. It feels funny to cycle into a new phase—constructed or not—in a place that does not belong to you, like sometimes I feel (not without anxiety) as though my home (just an apartment) could really use all the sentimental but meaningful Big Day energy I can give it. But a change is a change is a beginning and an ending, and the radical thing to do is to let that happen anywhere. All the holy sites/non-sites were anywhere once—the Ganges, Jerusalem, Mecca. I’ve always thought this end point on a dune jutting into the Long Island Sound felt like heaven, but my father recently told me it was man-made. Somehow it was used to draw the water from the harbor. For the boats. Industry versus tide. Like how consumer holidays are more recognized than equinoxes and solstices. I’ve been using the word “auspicious” when it feels appropriate, which I find is more and more often.

There are perhaps three kinds of creation. The first is to be aware of ourselves after we finish zazen. When we sit we are nothing, we do not even realize what we are; we just sit. But when we stand up, we are there! That is the first step in creation. When you are there, everything else is there; everything is created all at once. When we emerge from nothing, when everything emerges from nothing, we see it all as a fresh new creation. This is nonattachment. 

The second kind of creation is when you act, or produce or prepare something like food or tea.

The third kind is to create something within yourself, such as education, or culture, or art, or some system for our society. So there are three kinds of creation. But if you forget the first, the most important one, the other two will be like children who have lost their parents.

Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind 

We hit the deer going thirty miles per hour. It was snowing, we were being cautious. The deer was the reckless party. There were four of us in the car and we spilled out into the night seconds after the collision, staying near to the ground in case anything had happened to our bones or nerves or equilibrium. I say ‘our’ because everything becomes collective on a long journey. Our eating, sleeping, pissing. All together. 

                The driver was my friend. The other two were friends of my friend. The man who stopped to help us, he had nine fingers. A beard. A voice like a shovel hitting wet sediment. He helped us drag the deer to the side of the road. When I say helped I mean he did it while we observed. We were one woman and three men, watching the stranger’s breath plume around his beard. The body, the beard, the exhalation. It was cold and dark and we told the man he could keep it, and he laughed and shook his head. You’ll be taking care of this one, he said, as though he’d take care of the next thing we killed. What you’ve got to do, he said, is skin it. Cut off the head, the hooves. Carve up the meat. Put it in bags. You’ll eat for a year. 

                                            But sir, I said, we don’t know how to do any of that. I’ve never skinned a thing! Never severed a head. Never carved up anything larger than a piece of chicken breast. This is all wrong, I said. We’re going somewhere we’ve never gone. We couldn’t see, the visibility was weak, the deer — the deer was the reckless party. It wanted to die like this. Let’s leave it here. For other animals. Let’s leave it, let it turn from warm to cold. But the man was standing nearer now and he was explaining that the law clearly stated that it was our mess to tidy. Not the county’s. The deer couldn’t go on lying there, it had to be moved. It belonged to us now. I was mad at the driver, my friend. The other two passengers, they didn’t seem to mind. One of them raised ducks for slaughter in his backyard. The other had watched movies about hunting. 

                       The forest that ran the length of this road was swelling with unfathomable darkness and my head felt cramped. I looked at the deer’s dark eyes, and then I looked at the man leaning on his truck. He was looking at the deer’s dark eyes, too, but they were turned towards me. I watched his breath, like a second full yet fleeting beard. This configuration of gazes: the dead, the panicked, the obscenely serene. This triangle of nowhere.

We came in wanting. Wanting! Milk and warmth. Pale light and oceanic sound. It’s what got us to talking. We murmured our want, screamed it. Moved towards it, grasping. This is how we began to perceive distances. The far-away. That which is not in our own hands. Every twitch of the eyelid in the act of looking, gesturing around emptiness. We came in with austere bodies aching for abundance. You rambled on all fours in the backyard, doe-eyed and moist, a small traveler. On the path of ordinary lust. This means you are real. This means you are damned. Even the timid cannot go their entire lives without shouting and writhing from the force of it. One day you’ll look for another to pour your want into, and this will be more painful than you or I can imagine. But it will happen. Not once, not twice. But again and again, until all of the world escapes from your lungs.