There is a poem I know apocryphally – which is to say, I wish I could quote its lines in translation and that I knew who had written them down to begin with, but I do not. I know of the poem because I understand its meaning, because the writer Elizabeth Gilbert has spoken to her own audiences about this meaning. My description of this Japanese poem, held in memory over the years even though Gilbert’s re-rendered words have long dissipated, goes thus – a monk stands at the crest of the mountain and sees everything the valley and the sky contain. He sees everything. And then, he returns to the plains and to the ordinary rhythms of existence – carrying the mountaintop beneath his robes.
In telling this poem in my own words, a poem I may not ever have read myself, I have made a version of it that I want to hold on to. That is one way to do it: to press a place between the pages of our lives like a flower. And let it disperse its quintessence all over the crags and glens of our quotidian lives.
Find the secret ways in which to make them stay, ways only you know. A bookmark, a dried fern in a frame, a pebble in the pocket, the opening chords of a certain tune, a fragrant balm, a harvest that has travelled a distance still bearing the touch of the hands that raised it.