Above the mountains and the city, crashinginto stratosphere to flare unseen and crackle-rumble like less sonorous thunder, the mysterysound lifted our gazecoffee and an online heat map of the future sky.We’d learn, hours later, that a venerable rock had skippedEarth’s air, skipped terrestrial catastrophe, meteoroid returninglike a ship to the vacuum-dark sea. Door-cam videos,texts, the chatter of averted disaster : instead of mass extinction,a Tweet. It’s always like that, the moment as epoch, manifestoof a second or maybe two : enchantmentsat the edges of mortality. There was ridge-top lightning I ran from once, then, in a way, I blessed :that should be involuntary, like breathing, butwe grim ourselves with worry. Of course.When has fearever fixed trajectoriesor filled your lungs?–andit’s not that your slogan’s pithy feveris mistaken, but its t-shirt doesn’t help.What if, before moisture flux convergence and polaramplification, before Charney sensitivity, Lao-Tzuhad been right? That the only path to serenityis to do the work then step back. Like a fossilmade of smoke, he looked up with me. We staredat air whose crash we couldn’t then name. SoI sipped. He scritched on scroll.Made of scrub-jay digits, what was blue-feathered bone lands in our scrawny handslike a choice. The wake is silent. Then resumesthe granite, an outcast monarch, the locust-leaf wind.Like me, you can use that quillto message an empire. You can changeyourself even if the world refuses.Take it.
