What Is

by Mary Padilla

How odd that
everything is
mostly nothing,
if you look closely.

We are accustomed
to the big picture,
the broad brush stroke,
the macro level.

But when you see
below the surface,
it’s mostly nothing,
just empty space.

Music is all about
spaces between notes.
Art is all about
spaces around things.

Everything is seen
by contrast with nothing,
which is mostly all
that there actually is.

It’s the via negativa
that defines a thing
solely in terms of
just what it is not.

The occasional somethings
deform overall nothing,
affecting other somethings,
but only at a distance.

Paradoxically, we find that
to transcend somethingness,
we must first be willing
to embrace the nothingness.

Only then can we know
what it is to be something
other than something
to be reckoned with.

There is no reckoning
with evanescence,
and yet we can be
aware of its presence.

It is something
that exists
on the cusp
of non-existence.

Similarly, meaning is
what you encounter
when you are not trying
to discover what it is.

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

Transmission

by Mary Padilla

For meaning to travel
it has to start somewhere
and then go to someplace
set up to receive it.

These need to be tuned in
to the same wavelength,
and there must be a medium
that they have in common –

a sharing of context
to transmit a concept
that makes at least some sense
to both of the parties.

Of couse this is all true
of sound and of light,
but it applies just as well
to ideas and to feelings.

They too need a sender,
and also a receiver,
but communication
is still not guaranteed.

While these two elements
are both important,
they do not suffice
to create the connection.

There needs to be overlap
between expectations
so that the message
can be understood.

Otherwise
it’s just
a clash
of codes.

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

Reality

by Mary Padilla

We think we know what’s up, what’s out
what’s reflected, refracted,
what is, what’s not.
The surface bounces back the light
the same way it came in.

From here, seen there,
the medium’s a mirror.
From another angle though,
things would look quite bent,
broken, and greatly changed.

The shadow, when it’s long.
speaks to the sun,
and not the tree –
what its angle is just then
in relation to the Earth.

It functioned as our first sun dial,
telling us what time it was –
short or long, right or left,
morning, noon, or afternoon –
but never what was time itself.

What we see is what we get,
but it depends on how we look.
We need to keep this fact in mind
when, seeing just the shadows,
we have to decipher what is real.

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

 

Finding the Way

by Mary Padilla

 

You need to pay attention.  If you lose your way, there is a real danger that you may not be able to find it again.  People have gotten lost and died here, not even very far off the trail.

Keep the blazes in sight at all times.  One stroke means straight ahead, roughly speaking.  Two indicates a change of direction.  Try not to lose sight of the last one until you find the next, or else keep one person at the first within earshot while you scout around for the second.  (Never do this hike alone.)

The marks can be on trees or rocks, often quite far apart.  A vertical pile of rocks is a cairn, which also indicates a turn.  A change in blaze color means that a different path is crossing yours.  Follow your own color to stay on your path.

You must reach the hut while there is still light.  Dusk comes early in the mountains, as the surrounding peaks block the setting sun while it is still well above the horizon.  Footing is treacherous in partial light, and bears are more likely to be out and about then.  Their vision is poor, but their sense of smell is just as keen in the dark.  Moose can be a problem too, especially if you can’t see them coming.  At least until the moon rises, you must find some secure shelter before night falls.

This was Hansel and Gretel territory.  It was also the Appalachian Trail, albeit the rather gentrified segment of it in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, where the Appalachian Mountain Club maintained eight huts a day hike apart so you didn’t need to carry a tent, sleeping bag, and food on your back.  My 10-year-old and I had come to hike the circuit.

The first day we were careful to follow the instructions.  It wasn’t always easy, as the marks were surprisingly subtle, small, at varying heights, and unexpectedly far apart.  They weren’t exactly breadcrumbs, but this wasn’t going to be a walk in the park either.  After spending the whole day on the trail we made it to the first hut while it was still daylight, and after dinner went to bed early, exhausted by our efforts.

The second day was more of the same, but conducted with somewhat less trepidation. We were getting better at knowing what to look for and sensing where to put our feet on the ground without constantly looking down.  By day three we were becoming confident about locating the marks and finding our balance scrambling across the downed branches, boulders, loose rock, and streams that crossed our path.

It was midday on day four before I realized that we had been negotiating the trail all morning without trying, having settled into the forest, unconsciously reading the blazes and managing the terrain as we went.  From then on we stayed in tune with the trail, until our descent back to civilization at the end of day eight.  It was a return to a different world.

Thirty years later we went back and did it again.  This time there was no moment of transition – the woods were within us from the beginning.

 

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

Dispatches

by Mary Padilla

 

I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed.  I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion.  And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest.     

                                                    – Virginia Woolf, on  “To a Lighthouse”

                                                                                                                                                

I knew she was stage 4 from the beginning, I say

Don’t get too attached, you say

                                                                               ………

I hope the attacks are abating and you’ve been able to eat and keep your strength up, I say

Rough day, she says

If you tell the doctors you’re unable to eat and are getting weaker, maybe that would get their attention, I say

Things have been very rocky lately, she says

How’d it go with the chemo? I say

Afterwards I’m wiped out for a while, but call whenever you want – who wants to be left in peace? she says

Are things looking up today? I say

Had a good day yesterday…stronger – what good things strength and energy are! she says

                                                                               ………

How’s it going? I say

Just cancelled chemo this week – I can’t face it, she says

Is it any better today? I say

In the hospital yesterday and just tired and staying home now, she says

How are things? I say

Too sick to do anything for the last few days, she says

The last I heard you were sick and then you went incommunicado, I say

Today is the first day I could eat anything, and I have a humongous headache, she says

Better check with your doctor about that, I say

I’ll try to get an MRI, but now I’m fighting with Instacart because they abandoned my order on the sidewalk and I can’t make it downstairs anymore, she says

One thing after another, I say

                                                                               ……..

The cancer has spread to my brain – but thinking is what I do! she says

What can they do for this? I say

I’m seeing the radiation oncologists next week after a scan to check for spread to my spine, she says

How did it go at the hospital? I say

Utterly exhausted, she says

                                                                                ……..

I just spoke to her and found her subdubed and rather out of it – she may have thought I was you, I say

She wouldn’t talk to me, you say

She told me ‘I need food,’ I say

Her caretaker is coming this afternoon, you say

We had a brief conversation with big lapses before replies on her end, I say

She’s sleeping all day now, you say

I did say a couple of times that I would call back tomorrow when she might feel more up to talking, but each time she asked me not to go, I say

She seems no less tired after her hospital visit for the day of rest in the middle this time, you say

Finally she asked me to wait a minute and then disappeared, which was the same thing that had happened the last time we spoke, I say

The last time I went to visit we couldn’t wake her up to say good-by, you say

                                                                                ……..

She fell getting out of bed and broke her hip this morning and then refused surgery, but I have her medical proxy and told them to go ahead, you say

I talked to her briefly yesterday and she was totally there mentally, I say

Her cognition has clouded over now, you say

I’ll try calling again, I say

Hello…hi…hello…hi…, she says

Her doctor has put her into hospice, you say

I called again – she wouldn’t take the phone, I say

She is refusing to eat or drink, you say

                                                                                  ……..

She is nearing the end, you say

                                                                                  ……..

She died this morning, you say

 

 

 

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

On Staying Afloat

by Mary Padilla

I said what I said.
I said what I meant.
And I meant what I said
when I said it.

And that was true then
but now this is now,
and you need to continue
to change with the times.

Things that don’t bend,
will go on to break.
Being rigid can get
in the way of what’s real.

How could I know
when I said what I said
just what that would mean
some time after I said it?

Things change, and then
we need to change with them,
or be left far behind
when the paradigm shifts.

Yes, it was true then
but it no longer fits
what is right now or
will be in the future.

We can’t just stop time
and if we still try
it is then more than likely
that time will stop us.

To stay in the stream,
we have got to release,
or it will keep flowing on
past and then over us.

Mary Padilla: I write to see what will come out.

On Aggression

by Mary Padilla

To be dynamic, a snowball must share several characteristics. Having no intrinsic mobility, it needs to roll downhill if it is to roll at all. In so doing, assuming an appropriate degree of friction, it will inevitably pick up speed. Depending on ambient conditions, it will generally gain mass. All this change will drive the process, making it still larger, heavier, faster, and more difficult to stop. As it feeds on itself, acquiring increasing momentum, ultimately we have an avalanche.

But sooner or later it has to hit bottom. Having consumed everything in its path, it will lose motive force. Now its bulk will paradoxically restrict its progression. All that is left to it is to change its state, or, more correctly, to be changed in state, as this is the problem:

It has no mutability on its own, no capacity to become other than what it is, or, rather, than a reduced version of what it was – a random accretion of elements in the surround, stuck together without uniting. Incapable of changing or growing on its own, it must inevitably cede what it has acquired by rolling over things that it incorporated by crushing and compressing them, but that were destined to return to themselves in the eventual and inexorable thaw that will consume even the initial nucleus from which it began.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

As Seen Through the Leaves

by Mary Padilla

There’s a cloud on the pond. You used to see them overhead, looking up from a blanket at the beach or lying in a field. But there the grasses and wildflowers could get in the way of your line of sight. Now it’s the leaves. They roof over everything. You only feel the occasional drop from a gentle rain when it makes it through their overlapping panes. They spread themselves out like that to catch all the sun and stay alive. But this isn’t a dense rainforest. It’s oak and hickory, second growth. So enough light gets through that you can tell where it’s coming from as it shifts through the day.

But you can’t feel its heat anymore. It’s filtered out now. And it’s getting cooler, as the season changes.

Things have slowed down, and you have the chance to notice such things and to see and hear the squirrels, and the birds, and the bugs. And you have nowhere to go, which focuses your attention.

At night in the summer there are fireflies. But last night there were fireworks too, in the sky over the town. You used to go to see them. Last night they were partly visible through the trees from the top of this little hill. Some scattered points of brilliant colored light flickered up in an arc and then down, tracing a parabola on the distant sky beyond the trees. Succeeding waves of them kept coming, seen and not seen, as they rose and fell in volleys behind the leaves.

The booms trailed slightly behind, slowed by the distance, which muffled their loudness. It matched the intense insect sound of the night, and made a fitting counterpoint. The scene reminded you of a forest fire once seen through the trees at night in the Australian Outback.

Part way through, your attention was distracted by a beam of light coming down the road at the bottom of the hill, too slow for a car, too fast for on foot. When it got to some breaks between the trees you saw it was a cart drawn by a dark horse – or pony – going the wrong way for that side of the road, soundlessly. A shadowy figure within was shining a searchlight straight ahead. You couldn’t hear the wheels – rubber? – or the hoofbeats – unshod?

Between these glimpses through the leaves in the dark, so incomplete and intermittent, you kept asking yourself if that were what you were really seeing. But it lasted long enough that you could tell that yes, it was, although it seemed like a dream image, rather surreal.

No matter, you were beyond that now. The fireworks were over. The little interrupted points of life had stopped rising and falling.

Mary Padilla: I am interested in exploring ideas by translating them into words.

Nobody Goes There

by Mary Padilla

Nobody goes there
who plans on coming back,
because nobody who goes there
ever has,
and there’s no reason to suspect
that you would be the first,
or rather the last.
So better plan
as per usual
and know what it is
you’re risking,
– not even risking,
because this is a sure thing –
so what it is
you’re willing to give up
in exchange
for seeing for yourself
what no one
who’s been seen again
has seen,
or heard,
or experienced,
because
to know what it is,
it seems you need
to give up
what you know
in exchange,
without knowing
what it is
you will gain.
You could just lose
if it isn’t even
a zero sum game,
and the odds are
– well, you can’t know
what the odds are
until you play the game –
the chances are
– well, the house usually wins,
so it’s more of a wager
than an exchange,
a roll of the dice
in cosmic terrain.
You don’t know
until you try,
and chances are
you won’t get a chance
to try again.
But knowing
what you would know then,
what would be the chance
that you would?

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.

Letter to You

by Mary Padilla

You are free to say anything
to anyone
– even to me –
about anything.

You have 15 minutes.

I didn’t make it up.
I got it from a book.
No, it wrote itself.
I’m not responsible.
I don’t know what I think
until I see what I write.
It’s all been said before.
There is nothing new.
What is there to say
when you have said before
what there is to say?
I get what I like.
I like what I get.
Are they the same?
Are they not?
And then, what?
Where do we go
when we must go?
Where is there to go?
Where else?
Is there any there?
Why did we think
there might be?
Might there still be?
There might not be.
How would it be
if that were so?
When I say
what I mean,
do I mean
what I say?
Why or why not?
You must choose.
Must you choose?
Why must you choose?
Why not, indeed?
Because that is how it is.
Isn’t it?
How so?
And all this time
how could I
have thought so?
Did I ever
really
know?
No.
Did you?

Mary Padilla is interested in experimenting with using sound and sense to explore felt experience.