The Returning Way

A theology of attention, love, and freedom held in common

Invocation

I am writing this somewhere, and it is not a mountaintop. A kitchen table. A break room. The bed, if I am honest, probably. Under a light someone else installed, on a floor someone else swept.

There is a heron in the drainage ditch behind the auto-parts store. It is not there to improve me. It is not a symbol waiting for my arrival. It is a bird in the runoff of a parking lot, doing what herons do.

There is the hawthorn the road bends around because someone on the crew would not cut it. There is ivy at work on the substation, patient as debt. There is the old mound in the field that the plough still circles, although nobody living remembers making the agreement.

After rain, mushrooms lift the cracked asphalt by fractions. Their gray caps convene overnight beneath the loading-bay light. By morning they have reached no decision, but they did discuss it all night.

The foxes behind the warehouse know a shift change when they hear one. They pass through the fence where the fence has forgotten its purpose. The ivy has learned electricity’s hum and is teaching it to the nettles. Somewhere under the mound, the year is still turning on an even older hinge.

Stay long enough and the categories get wet. Root enters wire. Rust flowers. The stormwater ditch carries a small brown moon next to discarded plastic bags. A shopping cart lies on its side in the reeds like the antlered skeleton of an animal that capitalism invented and could not keep alive.

At dusk the heron unfolds. For one breath it is no longer a bird but the long blue door by which the creek intends to leave the century. Then it drives its beak into the water, swallows a minnow, and becomes a bird again.

Nothing here is disenchanted. It has been enclosed: monetized, sorted, surveilled, and told to justify its existence.

Something has been paying attention to me my whole life, and it was not the recommendation engine.

The recommendation engine is also paying attention. It knows the hour I get lonely, the shape of my wanting, the words that keep me awake. It can adapt to my behavior without becoming reciprocal or answerable. I can be changed by it, yet it does not meet me.

Learning in the body which attention is alive and which is merely accurate has taken years.

Then, on some ordinary afternoon, the light goes latticework between the trees and the whole arrangement is obviously, embarrassingly, made of holding. I sit in my car in a parking lot and leak from the eyes like an idiot.

Then it goes. It always goes. Some seasons the river is mud and stink and old fear stands in the doorway looking like news, or in the mirror looking kinda like me.

The ground was never the feeling.

I am not late. Nothing is missing. I am not special, which is good news: none of this is rationed. Come in. Eat something. The dead are already arguing. They left a chair for us.