A few days ago, a leaf opened behind my head.

They do this all the times, i realize, leaves. Opening and aging and all the rest of it. Frequently, I imagine, just behind my head. Still, I was just sitting on the couch reading a magazine when something crackled and I turned in time to catch it stretching and settling into place. By morning it looked like all the rest of the leaves.

That plant is also slowly growing flowers, and now I am slightly suspicious that it is just waiting until our backs are turned to unfurl those as well. Everything is growing and blooming right now, and it must be the smallest symphony when we're not there--the leaves snapping and sighing, everything taking tiny first breaths and then larger second ones. Playing for the sunshine, and the cat, and each other.

For a while in the 1700's, I hear, some Japanese monks took to mummifying themselves. The reasons why are sort of hazy, although honestly I'm not completely sure that you could present me with an argument for mummifying yourself alive that would make me think, well, sure, that makes sense. One version of the story seems to involve some lost secret tantric practices. The other version starts with a monk who decided to bury himself alive to stop a terrible famine, as one does, who turned up mummified when they dug him out three years later. Which seems like as good a reason as any to start a trend.

But you know, it's not easy to mummify yourself. For the first 1,000 days all you can eat is seeds and nuts while exercising to divest yourself of all of your body fat. The next 1,000 days takes you to roots and bark and a drink made of lacquer, so that your insides will be nice and shiny and poisonous to anything that might want to eat your fat-free remains. Finally you lock yourself into a tomb with an air tube and a bell and ring the bell occasionally for as long as you're alive. When your bell stops ringing your fellow monks seal up your tomb and wait another 1,000 days before cracking it back open to see if you've mummified. If yes, up on a platform for admiration you would go.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, self-mummification rarely worked as planned, and of the hundreds of monks that tried it only a couple of dozen mummies have been discovered. This must be part of the challenge--how do you know if you can mummify yourself until you try it? Going through the whole ordeal to end up just plain old decomposed, although also still just as dead.

We know at least the basic details of the mummification ritual, but I haven't yet been able to find an account of what it was like to crack the tomb back open. Would it be filled with a monster or a mummy or a treasure? Or more likely, a combination of all three.

A couple of months ago I read an article about some people who up and stole a whole bridge in the middle of the night. It seems like it would be hard to be sneaky, creeping up to a bridge with your wrench and a big truck and maybe one of those cartoon black holes in a suitcase, but I guess that's just what happened. And when the townspeople woke up in the morning it turned out that they just had to go ahead and wade to work.

Anyway, it turns out that stealing bridges is not an uncommon occurrence. I suppose if you're going to pull off a caper it might as well involve stealing a bridge with some fake papers and a winning smile. Bridges don't just walk away, so it's hard to say that we would even notice if one suddenly did, if we would just roll up our pants and wade to work as though it was what we had been doing every day. If our bridges suddenly disappeared it's pretty even odds that we would just retroactively decide that bridges had never existed anyway. What bridge? No one here but us and the leeches.

In the meantime the bridge thieves are probably sitting somewhere close, on a pile of ill-gotten gains and suitcases full of black holes, wondering how to separate us from our socks.

Really it was only a matter of time until someone told me about the circumhorizontal arc. I love an optical phenomenon, and I double love one called a fire rainbow even though it has nothing to do with either rainbows or fire. All you need to make one is a sun, flat ice crystals in some high cirrus clouds, and serendipity. Sometimes everything comes together just right and make rainbow flames in the skies.

This seems like the sort of natural phenomenon that would attach itself to myths and omens, but I haven't found any. Maybe it's just that some things are too rare and perfect to be mythologized, too beautiful to be anything but a good omen. It could be that a combination of good luck and lifted eyes is its own reward. I think we should be on the lookout in any case, so that we'll be ready if whatever appears in our skies next is the key to happiness or a new planet or a sack full of gold. It would be a shame to miss something nice, just for lack of looking.

An old man in an airport bar once demanded that I look up Bukowski's poem "The Laughing Heart". We were sitting there talking about poetry and love and drinking very tall expensive beers before noon and the poem has been sitting there all this time in its own browser window on my phone. (Although to be fair I also have a phone browser window dedicated to knock knock jokes.) I look at it once or twice a day on my way to something else and think about all of the things that strangers have taught me.

Since it lives on my phone it's become sort of my own private poem, but these have been hard times for so many people and perhaps it shouldn't be only my own any more. Perhaps it should be for all of us.

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-Charles Bukowski

I am in the middle of moving (in with my nice boyfriend, which is a revolution all on its own), which is exactly as insane a thing to do in the middle of starting a new job as you would think. I spent all but the first few months of my 20's in that apartment, and right now it strongly resembles the way it looked in 2003, sparsely scattered with furniture and mostly empty of life.

Kristina Hayes wrote a poem called "Now That You're 21", which starts like this:
"These years will be glamorous—all the
magazines say so. You’ll learn what not
to mix tequila with, what shoes to pair
with that dress, what your default lipstick
will be, the book and movie and song
that will save you after every failed relationship,
each summer-at-the-beach fling. You will learn
the measure of patience and most important,
how to be alone. You will collect lonely like
some people collect stamps, and you will
learn to keep the light on for it, because lonely
needs company, too. You
will learn that self-love is not
dragging a random from the bar home to
sleep in your bed, but that it
is making your bed before you leave the
house for the night."

And ends like this:
"Soak in these years like sunlight. Re-position
the needle over the vibrancy of your youth. Get
up from the lawn, brush the grass from your
kneecaps. Hail a taxi.
Find your way home."

One of the things that feels the most right about this move is how I don't feel like I missed anything before--I spent all of the years in that apartment being mostly happy and sometimes a little insane, adventuring and rampaging and learning lessons and sometimes doing everything all over again anyway. I had a lot of fun being that girl, living alone in my sunny apartment, and it makes it easy to look forward to this next thing. I have had a great time so far, and I have every intention of keeping it up.

If you need me you can find me out of my depth just about anywhere there's water, waiting to grow gills or learn how to swim. Somehow I managed to get myself thrown in all of the deep ends at once.

In Hawaii I got knocked over by a wave. The water got in my eyes and made tenuous my connection with my contacts, and before I could clear them another wave came and then another. I was stuck there for what seemed like years, not very clear on which way was up or how to negotiate standing. And then suddenly it was over, and I stood there muddy, bathing suit akimbo and brackish in and out, too disoriented to even be shaken for very long. Had I just nearly become a fish? I wasn't sure, but I was sure that I didn't want to know. Better to not think about what happens in the water to a girl without gills.

But the space beyond the waves in the metaphorical water is much less ominous than in the real water, and so I keep reminding myself that these adaptations are the way to getting what I wanted, that I've had gills all along and only need to remember how to use them. That getting through is only hard and not bad and the adventure of out of my depth is exactly all it's cracked up to be. Waiting has never been my strongest skill, but then neither has breathing water. I'll figure them all out eventually.

I read that some volcanoes erupt only once, developing in clusters in places where the inside of the earth is not quite near enough to set up a full plumbing system, spilling lava all over the surrounding terrain until their lava is all used up.

I was reading about a farmer in Mexico in the '40's who was out burning shrubbery in his cornfield when the cornfield started to burn back. The ground opened up and started smoking, and a week later they had a volcano on their hands. It took a year for the lava to overwhelm the neighboring towns, all the residents relocating to lands not scorched bare. After nine years it had finished erupting and went silent, so now the towns that were one swallowed by fire are being reclaimed by jungle, allowed to rest in the cool and the damp.

It always surprises me, all the ways there are to be a volcano.

We learned that the third rule of fairytales is to abandon the brambles the refuse to give way, to not waste away trying to see through the thorns when there's a scenic overlook just up the road. And still I stood there for a while, feet planted firmly in the road, sure that if I looked at the problem for long enough I would be able to see through it. It never happened, of course, but the best thing about fairy tales is how much can be fixed by plain old magic, and while I waited the thorns magicked themselves away and I could walk through. Scratched, of course, from all that time stubbornly thrusting my hands into the heart of things just to see if it still hurt, but intact and slightly wiser. It turned out the sun had been hiding behind the brambles all this time, and as I walked the love letters that I had hung on the thorns in the rain began to dry out. All of our faces lifted toward the light.

I don't speak very well, and sometimes I talk myself in the opposite direction of where I was heading. Partly this is because of my habit of chercher des chichis, the French phrase that translates basically as seeking frills but more closely means to look for unnecessary complications in things. The trouble with talking is that I get tangled up like a kitten in a ball of string, careening off and smashing things when I should have learned by now to stay still. I should learn to speak only in haiku until I can be trusted not to break things simply because they are unreasonably good. I should learn to trust the magic.

I should learn to say what is actually true as simply as a poem by Izumi Shikibu: "In this world/ love has no color/ yet how deeply/ my body/ is stained by yours."

Off the coast at Vik there are three spiky basalt fixtures. The beach is a dangerous one, the currents too strong for swimming. The story is that the trolls were pulling their boat up to shore too late and were caught by the sunlight, turning to stone. People have been navigating by these trolls since forever. I'm not sure it's the best idea to navigate by the landmarks of folly, but I suppose that in a turbulent landscape anything fixed is comforting.

Anis Mojgani's poem "Come Closer" says, "My heart was too big for my body so I let it go and most days this world has thinned me to where I am just another cloud forgetting another flock of swans but believe me when I tell you my soul has squeezed into narrow spaces." It's a lucky thing sometimes to be lighter than the trolls, to be air instead of stone. It makes our mistakes harder to see and impossible to navigate by, here in the calmer waters. Almost as though they never happened at all.

It was two years ago this past Sunday that I stopped for a drink after class and found a world slightly different than the one I had been living in, a stop different enough to shift the path I was walking down in a new direction even though I wasn't paying enough attention to notice. We didn't think to notice the milestone for a few days, which is funny because at this time last year I was heavy with anticipation given the way that everything had gone off the rails. It's easier to quantify what we've lost than it is to illuminate what we've gained. The Greek phrase for the goings-on of the past year is "istories me arkoudes", "stories with bears"--the kind of stories too narratively complex for believability.

Spring is here, a little, up in the tall branches of the trees, tossing the magnolia petals down to the sidewalk. I still have some trouble thinking about this time last year, the months between when things went upside down and when they turned right side up again, the mayhem that resulted. Better, then, is to think about this time this year, with the cherry blossoms at the tops of the trees and adventures on the horizon and everything the way that it should be. This time this year makes this time next year look even better, and of all the bears in my stories I prefer the brighter ones. Even if they are harder to pin down.

It's true that everything is basically made of rocks, but it's also true that I keep going places made from the unfriendliest of rocks, the kind that will cut you for looking at them. And so I think about all of the things that are thrown against them, the shipwrecks and the fish and the tiny snails. The water surely wears them away, but not softly. All of these rocks are constant tiny storms.

The rocks in Hawaii were covered in tiny white snails snuggled into all of the crevices. They seemed unconcerned by the waves, although they must have been brought there by them at some point. I don't know if the waves ever let up enough for the snails to move around and have little snail parties, but they seemed perfectly content just where they were.

Essentially, the history of navigational instruments seems to be figuring out the best way to get home, rather than finding a way anywhere else. It's hard to fix a spot on the horizon with a spot in the sky solidly in place on a moving boat, so we had to get more sophisticated. Our arms gave way to ropes with knots and eventually to complicated machinery, because otherwise there's too much world to be sure of much at all. It's hard to keep a fixed location on a planet that keeps on spinning.

I suppose there is something to be said for making sure we know where we've been when we don't know where we're going, but sometimes I think of those early days of exploration and how it would be almost impossible to get home if you lost your arm. Perhaps this is why we outsourced our navigation to technology--if you weren't going to come home whole at least you stood a better chance of coming home at all.

I started a new job for the first time in eight years after we got home from vacation, and it takes up all the brains I have. It's a nice change from what was going on before, but I am unaccustomed to being this kind of tired. My recreational research is a secret until after tomorrow, but I have been going down some soft green rabbit holes.

They say that taking rocks from Hawaii is bad luck, that Pele sees them as her children and gets angry when they're removed. Tourists send rocks back all the time in order to end a streak of bad luck. There's no similar good luck curse that I can find, but we must have brought something nice back in the backs of our eyes and the soles of our feet because things have been looking mighty bright lately. I don't know if we get the February we deserve, but I plan to keep the one I have.

It's funny how I think so often about what it sounds like when a city is flooded and left under the water but I don't think much about what under the water sounds like normally. So it was with quite a bit of surprise that I put my head in the water in Hawaii the first time and hear a landscape crackling almost like fireworks from fish eating rocks. Like no sound I had ever heard.

Only a little bit further under the water were the whales, chattering and singing, making cities of their own. Maybe Atlantis was never lost, just handed over to the whales, flinging their songs through miles.

I never liked living in a tropical place, but I always suspected that it would be a nice kind of place to visit. Everyone was confused when I told them I was going to Hawaii for a week, because of how vocally I dislike the heat, but my main point has always been that I don't like sweating, and sweating is so much less likely when your time is devoted to reading things and drinking tropical cocktails.

And now I am pretty sure that I need to focus more often on actually relaxing, since my leisure time is usually clouded by thinking about whatever it is that I should be doing instead of relaxing. And if it takes a steady diet of rum-based drinks and pineapple to do it, well, these are just sacrifices I will have to make.

In Costa Rica there are cloud forests where the trees consider the traditional way of drinking--through their roots in the ground and up through their trunk to the very top--but also the less traditional method of through the leaves and down. This makes clear intuitive sense when you're so tall and the ground is so far away, but it makes even more romantic sense since these trees live with their heads in the clouds most of the time.

But of course everything is getting warmer and the clouds are disappearing, and the trees are going to have to find a new way to sate their thirst. They tend to drink from their clouds during the dry season, when there isn't enough rain to make it all the way up from their roots, and so the trees that drink the most water through their leaves are soon going to find themselves with no clouds and fewer leaves and just the same old ways of drinking. The soil is still not going to be enough for them, but the clouds then won't be either. They'll have to invent new ways of being, or perish in the attempt.

I cannot even express how much I am looking forward to going on vacation, but right now it's most of what I can think about. The weather has taken a turn to the icy and I am a little tired of being cold. It surprises me to say it, but it seems that a beach vacation may be just what I need, all the turtles and sundresses and no mittens. I would like to be able to feel my hands again.

When we come back I have some big life change coming up, which I hear is good for me but which obviously makes me nervous every time I think about it. Still, if the alternative is things staying the same I will look forward to something different and try not to mess it up too badly. In any case it will all be an adventure.

I started reading a book about the Venus transits in the 1700's, which starts out by describing just what a difficult proposition it was when Edmund Halley proposed the observation project about 60 years before the first transit happened. Not only was there the obvious problem of transporting scientists from different countries across hostile waters and over unfriendly boundaries, although in the 1700's this was logistical challenge enough. More poignantly, no one at the time of Halley's suggestion had any sort of unified system of measurement, no way for these men to come back and discuss what they had measured at the ends of the earth. So they were proposing to measure the size of the solar system all using different lengths of string and dented tin cans. What Halley had done was suggest that science do the impossible, and it went out and cobbled the impossible together.

The faith of it is what amazes me, that these men who had rarely left their home towns had faith enough in the need of their mission to get on a boat and sail past the edge of the horizon. That they were going to measure the heavens or die in the attempt, that what they had set out to do was more important than politics or wars or technology. We were certain to figure it out eventually--we always had before.

Cautious by nature, I think about this a lot, the challenge of having faith in your own convictions and the inevitability of their outcomes. Are we sure we needed to know the size of the solar system? Couldn't we be content with know that it was there and wait for technology to catch up with our plans? But of course we couldn't, and we set out to fall into something we couldn't have predicted even if we had unified our measurements and synchronized our watches.

More to the point, I suppose, is Rudy Francisco: "If I was to wake up tomorrow morning and decide I really wanted to write about love, my first poem would be about you, about how I love you the same way I learned how to ride a bike: scared, but reckless, with no training wheels or elbow pads so my scars can tell the story of how I fell for you."

The perihelion was last week, but although the day strung itself out all clear and cold and dry we had all come down with the New Years plague and hunkered down instead warm inside rooms.

I wondered how the sun felt about the Venus transit, since the next time it plays host to such a show will be when almost certainly no one currently alive will be able to see it. How it spent all of the last year reaching loops of plasma out toward us which we captured time and again in photos even if we're unsure what it was offering. I wondered how it felt about us sending robots to Mars and under our ice and into the bottom of our seas, if it realizes how many thousands of years it takes for one photon of its own to reach its surface and fling itself out toward us. And if it minds that those photons would never be able to find their way back in.

The sun shrugged and continued turning, rolling back through its track in the universe, prepared to pay more attention when we decide to send robots to it.