Normally, I focus on craft here. But nothing feels normal now, from everyday tasks to conversation. I’ve been living in a strangely liminal space since my mother passed. I’m not sure what to say except that life and death aren’t the opposites they once seemed. I even wonder if there is such a thing as death. There is change and loss—irreversible, excruciating loss—but death? Looking at the world from this perspective makes everything—everything—shift in a way I can’t quite pinpoint or understand.

I just watched the movie Her, ostensibly about love between a human being and an AI. The idea did not excite me. I felt vaguely threatened. But in the end, the movie left me with questions I was glad for. Not the question of what is alive as opposed to what is not, but new questions, shifting my focus. With AI seeping into our culture and pervading almost everything we do, it feels like we’re living in times of tremendous flux. In the movie, an artificial being, a product of our human brains and cumulative experience, continues to evolve on its own, experiencing new ways of relating, interesting ways that seem expansive, even spiritual. I found myself thinking, what if life is mostly this—this phenomenon of changing and evolving in the dimension of time? Recently, stone itself came alive for me when I attended the premiere of a piece by Seattle composer Angelique Poteat. Her powerful and surprisingly emotional Pebble Conglomerate traces with geologic exactitude the evolving life of stone, the explosions as well as the melting, trickling and erosion, using specific instruments within the orchestra to capture the various, intermingling forces, from cataclysmically violent to piercingly serene. The gorgeous, complex, cosmic life of it all overwhelmed me…

I suppose my mother’s passing only reinforces a tendency I’ve had since I was a kid, to want to stand on the edge of things, to peer over the rim of my small boat into a dark, fathomless sea only to see reflected back the stars above so I don’t know what is up or down but am immersed in a glittering cosmos that spreads in all directions forever.

To bring this back to craft (I guess I can’t help it), I will share what I normally don’t—one of my own poems, as a way of illustrating the question that is foremost for me as a writer these days: how to find the words that will allow me, together with those who read or hear them, to hover on that edge. The endeavor is not new, but I’m wondering if I will find new ways. Capturing with words and phrases what is cosmic or awesome or unfathomable, or simply what is deeply true or real but still undefined, is a delicate task. Printing labels and slapping them on is far from satisfying. That’s all AI can do, sifting through all the available phrases and paragraphs, lacking any personal feeling as to how to combine them. When it comes to describing the thing itself, I’m no more capable. I can only evoke it. At most, I can keep my eyes on it, feel my whole body alive in the presence of it, my heart expanding or contracting, and describe my experience of it, from the inside. If feelings are a product of evolution, helping us to survive, and complexity is a matter of time, perhaps AI will evolve enough to describe its own experience of interconnection. Who knows where life is headed? The future feels as fathomless as the cosmos. The flux, invisible, feels palpable, an awesome river that carries us onward.

I wonder what new ways of writing lie ahead. Right now, all I know is to hover on the threshold of my mother’s passing and describe what I experience. I crave to make visible what can’t be seen. But if I’m overeager and hasty, my words will chase it away. So I slow down. If I’m very still, perhaps it will come to me—and to you who sit beside me. It is my most fervent desire that we meet in its presence. Why? Why sift through the endless words, feeling for the right one? I don’t know, but I let The Wind carry me. And it has yet to set me down.