Often, I attempt to spend time in total ambient silence. I don’t mean entering some sort of isolation chamber or using headphones. I mean just being, without artificially inducing noise for comfort or entertainment. In other words, no music, no background tv, no humming or whistling or tapping the desk. I would say no speaking, but I have never in my life been able to speak aloud in solitude. My own voice comes across as far too loud and alien. I must clarify that I try to create these moments of silence when I’m not busy at a task, because for me, concentration on something or engaging in an activity creates such a roar of thoughts, that my own brain drowns out the surrounding world. My purpose is also not to meditate–a practice I detest. After discovering over recent years the wide diversity among my fellow humans in their levels of mental chatter, ranging from no inner monologue nor visualization at all to my own vivid, unceasing stream, I think that expecting others to similarly corral their thoughts is arbitrary and unfair. I don’t need to stem my mental flow, but I do find a sense of fulfillment in listening to silence, especially in moments when my time is allotted for nothing but waiting–waiting for an online course to begin, or waiting to meet a student, for example. When I say ambient silence, it is not really silence at all, is it? Here in my office, the constant airy exhalation of my laptop is a permanent companion. An unidentified low thump, almost imperceptible, comes through irregularly. This side of the house is away from the street, so the cars are blotted out, but a rare dog or human vocalization may appear. Of course there are the short, urgent vibrations of phone notifications, that stimulate the nerves like Pavlov’s pets. I forgot to turn those off. If I sit in silence in the kitchen, the general universe is naturally much noisier. More people and vehicles pass near the windows, the overhead light screams in ear-ringing desperation, the lucky waving cats click away in the sunlight, faster than seconds on a clock, and overstepping each other’s beats with imperiousness. So why, what do I get out of sitting in silence? It is not easy, by the way. It can be trying to endure, with so many temptations of sound. Because this one emptied sense forces me to acknowledge my own existence, not to evaluate it, but only to know it and be content.

“I find myself acting like my mother.” This is a common refrain among women I know, especially in recent years, especially among those deep into motherhood. I, too, have repeated this statement, in moments when my voice takes on her tones, and my hands unconsciously trace her gestures. Uniformly, these words are meant negatively; spat out when I noticed reactions and expressions that I did not appreciate in my mom, things I promised never to imitate. This belief has shifted in the past year or so, from instant distaste to “I understand her behavior now.” Again, though, this is often cogitated negatively. While it arouses sympathy for mothers, it is generally a shared female code for “my kids make me crazy, so naturally I made my mom crazy as well.” It is taking negativity from the past and giving it a home in the present, justifying it, nurturing it, but not looking beyond its outward expression. She behaved a certain way in difficult parenting moments, and I do the same. Onward into the future. Even more recently, my perspective has shifted again. In moments when I find myself acting or sounding like her, I don’t feel bad, I feel a bond. Instead of simply understanding her, I am finally beginning to KNOW her. I could say, to start, that I know what it feels like for someone of her temperament to be shouted at by footsore children. But it is so much more than that. I cry in situations that probably made her cry, too. I think of her in moments when the shell of my self hardens in a dense, yet empty crowd. Often I share her quiet, observant smiles, or her exhausted, ridiculous outbursts of laughter. In truth, I begin to not only recognize, but embrace the pieces of her in me. The irony is that this awareness may not have reached me if she were still here. Her being my parent and me being her child might have gotten in the way. Over the great divide of mortality, I see her more clearly, and indeed, love her more pointedly.

The 61 words of the poem utilize the first 61 digits of pi, with each word containing the corresponding number of letters. (Zero is represented by ‘…’)

It’s a rain, a cloud quivering in mental space, yet gives constant direction, painful abundance, for my raw synapses.

That shared in secret joke, old but poignant, can in devised artifices shine.

… If sentient critters feel a detaching feather, a broken appendage, via perpetual yearnings, why persist awake?

I … tread, wobbling, in … imbalance, missing your sensation, your hold.

All night the wind screams at me, in one tireless exhalation. Sometimes louder, sometimes quieter, but never taking in a breath, only expelling an endless rage. I, like others, am trapped on an upper floor, powerless against it, so I succumb, and listen, and attempt to discern who’s voices are carried in this violent air, and what message they bear. I listen and listen, wakeful, and hear only the empty conversations of those who have no words inside. But no, as their voices gain strength, their pitches multiplying to stabbing wails within a broader howl, threatening to tear down my abode, I hear now, they are the voices of those with much to say, with much unsaid, who do not utter under the fearful light of day.

If you have moved overseas, or even to another region of a vast country, then you are certainly familiar with a period of homesickness. I use this word, however, not to mean that one wishes to return to the previous place, or even regrets leaving; indeed the new place may be much better than the old. Rather, the word signifies that the new place has not yet absorbed the imaginary definition of ‘home’ in the mind, while the previous residence still occupies that mental slot. For a lifelong roamer like me, a ‘home’ requires minimal features. No particular climate or scenery is needed. No cultural or even lifestyle conditions are sought, though some may be desirable. Home simply requires familiarity, at a level at which one does not feel like a stranger in society, but feels confident in navigating and participating in the daily churn of life.

Upon moving to The Netherlands five years ago, after leaving Texas (my first intercontinental move as an adult), I experienced this type of homesickness for more than a year, despite The Hague being the most wonderful place to live on Earth, and Texas, by contrast, miserably hot and car-bound, with broken roads and artificial air. When I made trips at intervals to Houston, to my father’s house, I entered an ease of mind that is drawn by familiarity, from driving on well-worn streets without need of direction, to finding my favorite groceries on the shelves. After these early visits, I felt reluctant to return to my Dutch life, until I actually arrived in NL and witnessed again the supreme standard of living. On one occasion, however, without any effort or expectation on my part, as the plane descended into Amsterdam Schiphol, I felt that I was returning home. I eagerly awaited the surroundings of my narrow old house in the Statenkwartier. My view of life was profoundly altered after this, as daily life began to exist fully and presently without detachment.

Now, residing in Cambridge, England, I experience once again the lack of ‘home,’ but this time, I don’t have another home somewhere else. In the place from which I have just arrived by airplane, India, I am merely scraping the surface of familiarity; indeed in India I revel in being a ‘stranger,’ as it allows an escape from the expectations of identity. My previous home, The Hague, no longer exists as such. Without family there, there is no abode waiting in which I can sneak downstairs before the family wakes to make myself tea and read in silence in a favorite chair. I don’t disparage gracious friends whom I can visit, but their friendly and welcoming houses nevertheless do not offer the utter freedom of a parental or personal dwelling. And the ‘home’ preceding that? Houston? After losing its role, it cannot easily regain it, no more than my many other previous homes can, like Philadelphia, Michigan, South Dakota, Saudi Arabia—each one more foreign as time goes on. What can I do, then? I don’t know of a solution except to wait in patience for Cambridge to gradually take on the job of becoming home, while in the meantime I have none, yet nevertheless attend to the duties of a relentless schedule.

I believe that flights to Kerala always land early in the morning—early, as in between two and five a.m. No matter your point of origin, you haven’t had sufficient sleep for this time and place. Passports, visas, don’t forget the arrival form. An extra check on the stamp. After emerging from the airport and facing the humid darkness, still in a sweater from some wintry territory, you jostle in a large family vehicle, eyes flapping with exhaustion, checking through the window occasionally to verify that you are in fact in Kerala: pointy stray dogs, overstocked banana sellers, squiggly writing, check, check, check. Soon we turn down a familiar lane; there’s the empty lot where trucks park between coconut stalks.

At last. A beige and purple concrete house, caged off from the road, a microcosmic tropical garden in a row of tropical gardens, though the rampant flora heed no wall or gate. The courtyard hugs me, carries me smoothly through the door while I envision lying flat on a floral sheet under a lace curtain. But first, embracing in-laws and dropping anchor at the round table to drink strong tea and make a flight report. Still wearing my wool sweater.

Cup empty, I ascend the cool black stone staircase, each step pushing me deeper into the heavy blanket of upper-story atmosphere. My body craves the heat; it will deconstruct and rearrange my atoms, like a cocooned caterpillar, so that the unique homeostasis of India may absorb me. There’s the bed in the dim room. You cannot throw yourself on a bed of this type. It is a ‘firm’ bed. It’s good for you. And by firm, I do not refer to a western foam-topped, spring-laden joyride of a mattress. This furniture is a slice of the Earth’s crust. Here you abandon Newton’s law of action and reaction. This bed pushes you with a force stronger than you and levitates you on a higher molecular plane, teaching your bones a lesson in two-dimensionality.

Stripped to minimal layers, you use every inch of limb to cling to this slab, then give up your physical form, trusting the humidity to hold you in place. My senses continue receiving: the bird squawking, patternless, outside the iron-barred window; the neighbors playing festive music—a daughter of their house gets married today; a savory aroma of hot oil battering raw spices, but that’s all for later. I pull the thin sheet tightly into nothingness.

At midday, a gentle voice with hidden claws strikes me, bleeding, from the underworld, where I was eating infinite boxes of baklava. My consciousness itself is impaled by worldly swords. Surely no more than three hours have passed. But it is time to dress for the wedding. The third immutable law of Kerala, after hot air and hard beds, is family events. Those neighbors with the music? It is their wedding we must attend—well, attend the food, not the ceremony. I sit up and wait for the physical world to quietly drape itself back on. I have no anxiety; I know it will infuse me with enough energy to accomplish the day’s minimal demands, which, after matrimonial biryani, consist of sitting on the veranda and eating curry. I float downstairs, at peace.

Today Fall came to the Netherlands. The Earth, for personal reasons, swallowed the summer air into its belly, to grind and digest for the next phase of its orbital journey. On the sidewalk, herding my jongens to the car, the air is still in its nightclothes, unaware of morning, pulling warmth from the sun’s filaments into its quiet snores. More than warmth, it sucks all life from the street, deadening sound, movement, vibration. I hurry to the safety of my steering wheel before it pulls out our own lives, one goosebump at a time.

On the road, the sun is low and lethargic, refusing to proffer the energy that the air insists on consuming in its stubborn sleep. I fight through the cognitive dissonance of needing sunglasses while I crawl in the shadows, a helpless creature, tossed carelessly by the arguments of the great celestial bodies. Our sky is empty and bright, blindly reveling in the final caresses of the sun’s fingers, while in truth that solar lover has already lost interest, and touches our high blue surface only because it is easy to reach, while it extends its real attention to other, better planets. In its departure it bothers not even to extend itself over the roofs lining our eager and desperate little society. Its remnants dangle through the leaves of roadside trees, offering glimpses and incomplete memories of the too-short, too-cold August.

The cold Earth, reluctant to be alone, reaches upward to its shining sky, offering gifts of glittering, dew-soaked grasses. But the gifts fall back, unreceived. The collapsed air bunches in heavy fogs, hiding the grass, smothering we small animals in our cars. Defeated, it can’t even lift and scatter the dense aroma of manure, so we wearily accept it as another layer of the oppressive winter blanket that we are not yet ready to don.   My thoughts are settling, reminding me that as the days are falling away, the year is falling away too. Everything is shorter, shorter, shorter, including my life here in the Netherlands, and there will never be enough time.

I’ve never thought of myself as a flower person–hippie chick, not flower child. I don’t buy cut flowers, and I prefer not to receive them as a gift–I know, I know, it’s hard on my man. But my reasoning is simple; cut flowers are already dead. Their color and joy and fragrance upon entering the home quickly reveal their mortality, as the petals droop and the creeping acrid aroma infiltrates the rooms.

               But cut flowers are not flowers in their natural environment, no more than taxidermy is a roaming herd of beasts. There are flowers here in Nederland, fields full of them, commercially grown for export–their bulbs that is, while their rainbow heads are perfunctorily chopped by tractors. The zoo animals of the flower world.

               Now I’m writing to tell you that I rediscovered flowers, that is, wild flowers, high in the mountain meadows of Alpine Italy. Emerging from the cable car, my hiking boots heavy on my legs, eagerly kicking for a long trek, I follow the appointed path. Then the crowded trail thins, and a vastness opens up. Yes, yes, I’m supposed to view the towering mountains; mountains, mountains, bla bla bla. What I notice is the colorful floor, infinite, as far as my tiny animal senses can discern. I must enter this wonderous field that undulates in every direction around me, now smooth and level, now diving steeply into the valley, now rolling gently upward in curving hills. The call of the trail is muted. My feet forget their purpose. An obsessive thought takes hold: how could a painter ever capture this world of flower and grass? The near ones, certainly, could be rendered as lovely little creatures, but the far ones? No. I can’t even find words in the extensive English language to capture what they are. A sprinkling of yellow on soft shades of green? Not a sprinkling; sprinkles are individuated. Splashes of color? But splashes are erratic and covering and wet; this is fuzzy, velvety, while permitting its green underpinning to shine through. Clouds of yellow? But not airy. More solid. Nebulae of firm, richly matte, yellow stars in a warm green expanse.

               I give up. All that matters now is to be physically present within this field of flowers. My steps are cautious, light. I rue that my giant boots crush a dozen blossoms with each movement, but there are too many; there is no other way forward. My body is already hot and damp with summer sweat, yet the deeper heat of the wildflowers draws me in. I want to feel them more fully. I want to be among them, within them, surrounded, buried. They are so small, seemingly fragile, I search for a place to lower my giant giraffe-body to their level without crushing an entire neighborhood; I turn my boots onto their toes, hoping my now hoof-like feet will announce my good intentions.

               Finally sitting, I succumb to the wildflower world, and it’s not at all what I expect. I knew there were several different colors present, but how many colors is indeed a surprise. Not just yellow, but many hues of yellow–some strong and bursting, others thin and quiet. Purple, of course, whether pale and pinky or sharply violet, almost convincing me it is actually blue. I’m most attracted to the orange; low in population, but shouting their presence nonetheless. I know the names of perhaps two: the buttercup, the clover. The rest are strangers.

               The more I observe, the more their society astounds me. What diverse harmony there is here. Each flower lives next to companions of different kinds, not its own kind, thus rejecting any pattern or segregation. Static chaos. Its fellows are nearby, but out of reach. Their immobile lives only allow communication with adjacent neighbors, but they are certainly content, viewing only others who are unlike them, never seeing their own shade nor shape. There are surely more flowers here than humans on Earth, and much more densely situated. How do they achieve such peace? They may be rooted, but they are not in fact, still. I feel their movement on the edges of my skin. They wave and shudder; they curl away from the heat brimming over the roofs of grass. They push and stretch, growing, unfolding, perhaps aching, as each invisible moment passes.

               After I few moments I become aware of the noise. The field is roaring around me. Of course! The flowers are mating. Scores of bees, themselves appearing in multiple varieties and species, circulate around me, landing, searching, tasting, touching, brushing their pollen deposits on yearningly open petals. More bees are audible than visible, vibrating the sunshine. I try to see them better, observe their work. I lower my face into the grass, but even my eyes are too large, the points of grass get in the way and poke me. I sigh. My time here is done. Unwilling to leave, yet I can’t be part of their world. They achieve much here, though; in their crowded, busy existence. I can only hope to learn something from them.

I know why my mom turned her face to the sun. In her 64 years of life, well, I know from the 35 years she shared with me, that whenever a ray of sun pierced through an otherwise imperfect atmosphere, her chin went up, her eyes closed, and her cheek opened to its warm touch. She was born and raised in the Netherlands, and in the mere four years I have now resided here, I feel my own head tilt, my neck stretch out, the very surface of my skin lifting in appeal when I feel those rays. Neither she nor I are strangers to sunshine. She birthed me in the Arabian desert; later I grew in the Great Plains of North America, where crushing, blizzard-filled winters contrasted with blazing, big-sky, mosquito summers. I believed I despised sunshine. Here in the Netherlands, though, it’s a week into June: the air, while cloudless and bright, pulls on my arms with chilling strokes. The building I’m in is built for insulation—keeping out the beating winter, but also the meager daylight. As I exit into the parking lot, the wind blows across the blue sky, tearing my expectations, or hallucinations, of the warm season. So I slow my steps. The less I move, the less the wind is able to find me. The car has been warming all day into a box that would cause certain death in Texas, but here is a den where the wind can’t reach. I arrive at the kids’ school for pickup, and now remembering to remain still, I open the window. The sun shines in. I dare not move lest a waft of chilling breeze senses my presence. I’m safe, though. I extend my neck as my mother always demonstrated; tilt my head, lift my cheek. There. I’ve captured it. I turn up the greatest song of all time—Zeppelin’s Over the Hills and Far Away—wave at the friendly bus driver, who knows me as the only mom who openly blasts rock music, and close my eyes. Ten minutes of pure solar absorption. Now I know. I wish I could tell her.

My eyelashes cling together, tangled even. My breath is so shallow it seems to serve no purpose. My body permeates the background, awaiting instructions. My brain is stuck on a singular problem, however—why is it emerging from a state of unconsciousness when it had been running its program of daily functions only minutes before? Is there a mistake in its chronometer? No, the answer arrives; I deigned to provide it with an unscheduled treat: an afternoon nap.

That solved, my thoughts freely turn to the state of my body, wherein I expect to find a patient host of discomforts and demands. But surprisingly, I encounter only stillness. More than stillness, my limbs are rigid branches, baking and peeling in a dry sunny wood. I seek out further sensations or movements, but every knowable muscle is suspended in spacetime, released of its duties, so quietly immobile that I begin to doubt their abilities. Only my chest shudders lightly with rapid inhalations, as if it is a flat pan collecting steady water droplets. The synaptic chain of logic bustles in, reminding me that of course I can move if I wish; I simply need to command my body into action. But why would I want to? Why disrupt such perfect quietude? The warm blanket grasps me, further arguing for the continuation of this inanimate state. Yet the longer I allow my body to remain thus detached, the more voluble the argument inside my brain becomes. If I don’t exert my muscles and break this immobility, they might cease to function! What nonsense. There is plenty of time. If you had remained asleep the time would pass just the same; don’t rip the peace from your body just because your brain is awake. The latter point wins and I accept the feeling of nothing but stillness, the even pressure of the couch surface, the gentle drumming of my chest. The rigidity in my limbs I now recognize as a steady buzzing, harmonious in its way.

I allow my eyelids to peel apart and let in the sunshine which is blasting the window—an essential component of the afternoon nap, you realize. The gauze curtain filters the light into a complex pattern. I had always assumed the curtain to be white; now it is blue. No matter though; when the body is away, the mind accepts any apparent reality. The only thing I find curious is that the patterns of the curtain are not inanimate in accordance with the rest of existence. They are in constant motion. Streaks of dark grey interrupted by irregular smudges of lighter blue roll and deform and realign, like a cloud of gnats circling one’s face on a wooded walking path. But why such movement in my curtain? The window is closed. The chilly spring breeze has not yet assimilated to the long arms of the sun. Ah, now I understand. My eyeballs are the ones in motion. Like my heart and lungs they never rest, even in the depth of unconsciousness.

Ah well, let them flutter if they must. It does not deter from my supreme contentment. Waking from an afternoon nap, its primary feature being total separation of the body from the mind, classes it with those other two simple, yet extreme human pleasures, laughter and well, the other one. As my daily work takes over, I will forget this moment, only to be surprised when it visits me again.