It's funny to me, how we came to this place on a whim three years ago, piling thirteen people into rooms built to hold twelve, letting all of the laughing blow all of the reds out from under my eyelids. And how in the time since it's become this beautiful anchor that rests just under my skin, one of my favorite places just a ferry ride away. It's funny, all of the places our hearts call home.

This time of year the lowest tide is well past dark, so it's possible to take your winter adventure boots and a flashlight and walk all the way out on soil that is usually hidden and cold and dark. Which is lucky, since that is almost always exactly the soil I want to see.

I went to the woods this weekend, just for a day, happy to wash the restless off of my bones for at least a moment. Lately I have been thinking about the Nietzscheism "We want to be poets of our life — first of all in the smallest most everyday matters." I suspect that it is my very need to construct all of this beauty and meaning with my own hands that makes it so frequently far away. I suspect, generally, that poetry is something the universe gives to you only when your hands are closed. I suspect that some things are just never going to come closer. Still, I think that the closest approximation often comes with movement and watching and finding tiny frozen mushrooms in trees, with looking at the oldest things with my newer eyes.

We're going to celebrate Thanksgiving on magic Orcas Island this year, my whole merry band of reprobates tumbled like puppies into the cabins for days on end. I know I said this last year, but it's still true that the thing I am most thankful about is that I find myself never lacking for love and friends and laughing, for ill-conceived shenanigans and hilarity and adventures. And sometimes, for poetry in the smallest most everyday matters.

Not too long ago I read an article that suggested that the reason the octopus is so smart is because it evolved out of its shell, and so suddenly became soft and free and able to explore. The sudden unmooring of the octopus from the bottom of everything gave it a chance to become all brain, to line its tentacles with tasting and its mouth with poison and its actual mind with all of our shapes. Maybe this is why they need three hearts. Sometimes that makes sense, but then mostly just the one seems so difficult to maintain.

Last night we were watching a documentary in which a man in a jungle climbed a giant tree to steal honey out from under bees with his bare hands. It took him more than an hour to get to the top of that tree, to hack into it and send down baskets of honey to his family. (Men of the Aka people reportedly spend more time with their families than any other known society, enough time to make defying thousands of bees a commonsense activity.) I like that story each time it's told, about pulling uncommon things from surprising nooks in the world with our hands, building layers of serendipity and hard work and magic.

The documentary didn't finish the story, pulling away with the man still standing in the tree, no clear way back to the ground. The way down is never as important as the struggle up.

It is time for planting paperwhites, for making something bloom in time for Christmas, all bright white in dim rooms. Paperwhites are related to daffodils, their perfume too strong to just be ghosts of spring's shouting yellow flowers, their bulbs and leaves still laced with poison. The stories say that the whole genus of narcissus stems from the youth who fell in love with his own reflection, but in the language of flowers a gift of paperwhites is a sign of hope, of a belief in the sweetness of the recipient. Paperwhites are the only members of narcissus that don't require a period of cold and dark to bloom, and perhaps this accounts for it.

If I could I would write messages with paperwhites under your windows. If I could, I would tell you all of my secrets with flowers.

I have been to the edges all alone, hands torn and ragged, talking in science and thinking in poems. The secret of ultima thule is that it is only blank space, that the world off the edges of our map is where nothing like monsters live. I would put my hands over the holes in you, give you the space to breathe and to heal, if only you couldn't see all the way through me already. I would throw your secrets off the edge of the map, over the cliffs I have already risked so much to see. At heart ultima thule is only the place beyond the borders of the known world, and so I think that the closer we walk toward it the farther away it always gets. I don't know if it's the distance or the height that causes a freezing that starts in my marrow and shatters my bones, but maybe it's only the freezing that will cause everything to mend again. Maybe the flowers to be found there will turn out to be the sweetest ones to harvest.

The hummingbird and I have been doing a careful dance since we first noticed each other last year, recognizing perhaps in our advancing and retreating a certain set of similarities in the too-quick fluttering of our hearts and the frailty of our bones. The fortune teller in Italy told me that my spirit animal is probably the sparrow, tiny and drab and wallowing happily in the dust, but sometimes I wonder about hummingbirds. There's something familiar in how the energy they need to keep themselves alive is conversely what keeps them always so close to starvation. As though in the late nights they can probably hear their bones clattering together, too, all hollow and anxious.

It was comforting to have the hummingbird in the trees through the hard winter of last year, to have a focus on needs other than my own. In the summer it ranged farther away, not needing me anymore with all of the flowers to visit and neighbors to meet, but in the last few weeks it had become a constant visitor again. I have spent much of the same time camped in my apartment, finishing my thesis project, and we have slowly become more familiar.

This afternoon I took down the feeder to resupply it with liquid, and when I went back on to the balcony to hang it back up the hummingbird was hovering around the window boxes, searching for it. It moved just out of reach while I put everything back together and then moved right back in as soon as I stepped away. It seems we've come to some new understanding, the hummingbird and I.

I've been looking for fortunes in all of the dregs, drinking to the bottom of cups and rivers and oceans and eyes. Someone has to be hiding the future somewhere, I figure. In a teacup or an orange peel or something.

It's been nearly a year since I threw open the doors to Legba, wrapped up a wish with tribute to the voodoo queen and knocked nine times as instructed, looking for secrets in legends. They say that Legba stands at the crossroads, speaking all languages, deciding who gets to talk to the spirits. In some cultures under other names he can be tricky, dispensing destiny from a sack worn across one shoulder. I wonder what is at the bottom of Legba's cups, all the secrets in the smoke.

The wishing stump belonged to the voodoo queen Marie Laveau, although the question of whether it was the property of mother or daughter is still somewhat mysterious. They say that there were at one point many voodoo queens in New Orleans, but that the competition all faded away once Marie Laveau decided to be queen. She's queen still, and the inside of the stump is layered with wishes. In this way it is something of a comfort to think of my wish snugged down in there with all the rest, waiting for whatever happens next.

My ants are slowly dying off, lying curled in the bottom of the tank. If they had behaved in the predicted ways the living ants would have brought the dead to the surface where I could have swept them out, the tank slowly emptying, the last ants wandering alone through once crowded tunnels. My ants have so far done everything backwards, and dealing with their dead is no different. Since there's no way for me to get to them without finding my fingers in the grip of those pincers I have left them there. Each day it becomes a little more disturbing, watching the living ants sleeping among the broken bodies of their fellows, at the bottom in a graveyard they built themselves.

From now on, I am sticking with sea monkeys.

What I have learned is that the red in fall leaves comes from anthocyanins, which is possibly not news. It turns out that the anthocyanins work as a kind of sunscreen, protecting new leaves and autumn leaves from certain kinds of damage and stress. It seems that what they didn't realize until recently is that maybe the soil is sometimes to blame for all the red in the leaves, that trees in poor soil make more red in order to keep the leaves stuck on the trees long enough to store up enough food for the winter. All these trees are becoming vibrant in order to survive.

I don't know if I believe that the secret is all in the soil. Seems like the sky and the rain and the wind are probably involved too. Still, I wouldn't blame you if you started carrying nitrogen around in your pockets, ready to coax the most brilliant colors out wherever you travel.

My hummingbird has been showing up regularly again, now that the flowers are fading and my apartment is a major source of food, and I wonder about why it is that the zugunruhe seems to vibrate more consistently along my bones than it does along hers. If it's true that the length of the zugunruhe is supposed to correspond to the length of the instinctual migration, it worries me slightly that I seem to be constantly fighting the urge to move, restless and adventure-laden basically all the time. Seems to be baked into my bones.

I like to consider the Valley of Flowers, a nearly inaccessible national park sitting way up in the Himalayas. It's a place of incredible diversity, they say, partly just because it's so hard to get to that no one willing to travel there would be willing to damage what they see. It's the sort of place where the only real reason to visit is simply that it exists, to look at it and then leave again. The fight between hope and experience is daily so much work, and it helps that the Valley of Flowers exists. If only for its use as a metaphor, and an anchor.

But I've been thinking about constellations, about all the paths in the stories that ended with being placed in the heavens. It was a punishment just as often as it was a reward, sometimes both in the same story, but immortality is immortality. Even if you're being held up for your mistakes forever, it's still something to be able to always light the way. Maybe that should be the goal, rather than spending so much effort on the execution.

Probably the first sign was the disorder in my circus train, all of the lions having tea with the trapeze performers, the elephants holding up the lamps and the clowns serving cocktails. Garden variety mayhem. It was obviously only a matter of time until the ringmaster shaved off his mustache and shot himself out of a cannon. There's a certain inevitability in the chaos I grow around here.

I keep watching the video of the baby elephant learning how to use its trunk, just over and over and over again. It's a major appendage if you're an elephant, such a large part of how you interact with the world, but I guess you have to learn how to use it just as much as anything else. I was looking at pictures of elephant brains the other day, thinking about how complicated it must be to be an elephant, but I left trunks out of the equation altogether. Maybe you'd need an extra limb to deal with all that brain.

If I were to run away and join a circus, I think I would probably want to be an elephant.

I think back to that lone Panamanian golden frog, waving to no one at all on a riverbank. The point of all the semaphore is that the water is too loud to hear anyone croaking, and so just because it maybe hopped off to run an errand one afternoon it is doomed to wave without answer. As though breathing through your skin might not be the most dangerous thing of all.

Anyway, it turns out that to your average Panamanian the sighting of one of those frogs is considered to be good luck, which is sort of a cruel joke given that all the rest of the survivors were scooped up and spirited away to a secret location. All that's left is that one hypothetical leftover frog, dispensing luck with all his might, friendly and waving and breathing through its skin. The secret is that its skin is also making a neurotoxin, because luck is a thing that should be seen and not touched. Maybe that's where the luck is, in coming so near the most toxic of frogs and living to tell, in wanting to hold it in the palm of your hand and yet refraining. Maybe they're just as lucky in captivity as they are next to cool green riverbanks, when the only option is to look instead of touch.

The only logical course of action, given an unbroken stretch of wet cement, is to avoid it completely. We know already that an expanse of pristine snow is always better than snow that we've stepped on, that the satisfying crunch of the ice under our feet doesn't usually cancel our how our steps are left behind us. Given the relative permanence of cement, better just to leave it all to the leaves and the roots and the raccoons.

I think about your fingerprints, you know, all the ways you are leaving them on all the faces and the hands and panes of glass. Cavalier, as though you have an unlimited supply, as though it doesn't worry you in the least that some day they may wear through. As though the most significant danger isn't simply that we will fade away altogether. I wonder if the largest challenge of wet cement is simply that we might fail to leave an imprint at all, no matter how hard we press, that even when approached thoughtfully permanence might be just beyond our reach.

I understand the lure of Atalanta, running sure-footed and alone along paths and through time. Seems to me like being left on a mountain-top and raised by a bear would be an excuse, but probably not the reason. It's easier to enjoy running when no one's looking when no one is ever looking, hands full of wishes and eyes full of thoughts notwithstanding. I wonder about how clear those paths might be, Atalanta speeding down them in soft shoes and hair streaming behind. If this is the only way to become a warrior.

I was reading about Hinduism and tonsure, all of these pilgrims shaving their heads and sacrificing beauty and vanity in the name of a fresh start, and how when they leave all of the hair is gathered and sold to make artificial hair weaves. I know that sometimes the same process is used for humiliation and punishment, but as usual it's really the sacrifice that I'm interested in. I love the feel of sacrificing vanity to absently fuel vanity, the way all of what we give up in the hope of something better is so often taken from where we left it and turned into the opposite, the way we hide nettles just behind our roses and wonder why we come out of our runs all covered in welts. As though the only way to truly make a fresh start is without our skin altogether, only nerves and muscle and bones, speeding through time. Hands full of wishes and eyes full of thoughts.

In a box on the side of the road I found a quena, playing quietly. Maybe it was just the wind, wandering by, peering through the cracks in the box. More likely I think it was just that our bones play themselves, making music even when liberated from the confines of our skin. If our bones are flutes, maybe we don't need harmonicas for hands after all.

I've been thinking about the legend of the quena again lately, now that the rains are back and I can breathe again, about the Incan princess who never knew how long the memory of her bones might be around. I wonder about how the legend splits, how in half of the stories the forlorn lover is inspired by her memory to make the quena out of reeds and bamboo but how in the other half it is her bones themselves that form the instrument. And how the legends are equally split on whether he was driven mad by his loss or if making the quena was a perfectly logical act. In the way of most legends, the answer is almost certainly somewhere in the middle of it all, and yet nowhere near any of it.

I can't even tell you how many things I am touching with palms lately, knuckles all sore from carrying these fists for all this time. Maybe it was the trees, sinking their calm and their quiet through my palms all summer while I was busy looking elsewhere. Maybe we've just followed the corpse candles all the way through to the other side of the swamp, and touching with palms is the reward for making it through the adventure almost entirely alive and intact. There are more swamps, of course, all laid out in a row and full of wolves and candy and shiny diamond monsters, but the point is that this one here has been crossed. The second rule of fairytales is to pause in your clearings whenever you find them, since there's no way back but forward. 

I hear that in Haiti there are all of these gingerbread houses that survived the earthquake, left standing where everything else had been shaken to rubble. The houses are more than 100 years old and have largely fallen into disrepair, all fading wooden lace and ghosts. Now in the absence of anywhere else to go people are moving back into the gingerbread houses, rehabilitating them and re-imagining all the ways they can be used. Given that it's Haiti, I'm sure everyone will just live alongside the ghosts. Which is an outlook we would probably all do well to learn.

I have been reading a lot of John Muir lately, thanks in part to a really thoughtful birthday present. In one of his essays he talks about a valley with two skies, blue above and an unbroken carpet of gold below, both stretching as far as can be seen. Lately that's how all of these paths are looking, two skies and something lovely in every direction, all wrapped up in the soft approach of fall.

In the night I crept through quiet rooms, stopping to rearrange your strings, wanting to make this game of cats-cradle the easiest to win and lose. My hands are clumsy and my heart worse, and it's not really cheating if you're only stacking the deck a little bit. It's only that I've still just got enough iron under my skin for this one nail, so it would be a shame to let it all go to waste. There are so many things that can be fastened by so little.

The answer lies somewhere in those strings, wrapped around your heart thumping sweetly in your chest. I have every intention of creeping in as often as possible to move them around, to make more room for the winning hand. And if while I'm in there rearranging I happen to expose a tiny golden frog or untold treasures, well, that will just be one more good thing to add to the list.

If I were to come with a set of instructions, they would tell you to look for me in the maps without oceans, where the territory that falls off the edge is the same as what starts over again on the other side. They would point to my own heart and its uneven wobble, to the chambers all full of gold dust and candy. They would tell you to look for me, scattered, sown broadly across the land, becoming strong in the sun and the rain and torn backwards by the wind. Some assembly required, certainly, but perhaps not recommended.

Tomorrow I start my last quarter of graduate school, and if I had it to do over again I would definitely rethink the also working full time aspect of things. It must be easier to do one thing at a time, instead of all of the things at once. I'm feeling spread thin, and there already wasn't much of me to go around.

Still, it's funny to think back to the start of it all, to the summer of not overthinking and all of the ways things have not changed. I've made it almost all the way over this mountain, and still I don't quite know where these foothills lead. To somewhere better, I hope, or at least brighter.

During the summer that this all began I was also supposed to be writing a horror movie with a friend. I've still never seen a horror movie all the way through, and I also still haven't written one. Maybe the ends of all of my paths are covered in haze. Maybe they just don't have ends.

I started an ant farm last week--because this year I turned eight and started an ant farm and tap dancing lessons--and the main thing I have learned is that nature is even more inscrutable than I thought. I could chalk this up to the fact that these ants are living in space gel instead of dirt, but I feel like they would have responded in pretty much the same way. The very first thing those ants did as soon as I dumped them, chilly and hazy, into the tank, was to build themselves a tower. And even though they have since dedicated some time to constructing tunnels, they have devoted equally as much time trying to figure a way out.

This isn't a thing mentioned in any materials anywhere, how determined these ants might be with their giant jaws to chew their way through the rubber seal and then presumably through the plastic above it, and so I'm not really sure how to respond to it. For the moment I'm content to let them work it out on their own, but I worry that there will come a time not too far from now that they figure out how to break free, standing on each others tiny shoulders and eating their way out. Fortified by space gel, it'll probably only be a matter of moments after that that they will also eat their way through me.

I have all of these secrets, all of these things to say that, honestly, will probably turn out to be untrue some time in the near future. No matter how true they are right now. I've been thinking up ways to preserve them and see if they keep. What if what's true now keeps being true? Stranger things have happened, I'm sure. Somewhere. Ghost ships might mean storms, but then they might also mean that the atmosphere has gone perfect for just a little while.

Anyway, what I want to do is write all of these secrets down and plant them next to something that flowers soft and small and sweet. If it grows with those words printed all over those petals, I'll know for sure. At least, as sure as I ever know anything.

But about those ghost ships and their atmosphere. I was reading about Fata Morgana the other day, the trickiest kind of mirage, where you could be seeing basically anything at all that's not actually there and believing that it's real. Over and over and over again, sometimes. Upside down and backwards all at once, and totally solid all the way through until you get there, which of course you never can. Because the atmosphere is tricky like that. This kind of thing caused all sorts of problems for explorers, naming mirages after people and mounting expeditions to find lands that don't actually exist no matter how real they look through your binoculars.

I'd be perfectly happy to go and check on what exactly it is that's just over the horizon, casting these reflections, if only it would stop slipping ever so slightly out of reach.