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By Root 1255 0

the primary reason for existence, is to lie naked with your lover in a shady grove of trees? What if the point is to taste each other's sweat and feel the delicate pressure of finger on chest, thigh on thigh, lip on cheek? What if the point is to stop, then, in your slow movements together, and listen to birdsong, to watch dragonflies hover, to look at your lover's face, then up at the undersides of leaves moving together in the breeze? What if the point is to invite these others into your movement, to bring trees, wind, grass, dragonflies into your family and in so doing abandon any attempt to control them? What if the point all along has been to get along, to relate, and experience things on their own terms? What if the point is to feel joy when joyous, love when loving, anger when angry, thoughtful when full of thought? What if the point from the beginning has been to simply be?

When I went to graduate school that first time, I spent many evenings talking to an instructor in the English department. He mentored me for a year of independent study in creative writing, and we became friends. It was not uncommon for us to talk in his office till dawn. He was a Christian, and one night spoke of his belief: "Your faith must be strong enough that you can walk the path blindfolded."

Without thinking, I responded, "No. Wherever you put your foot, there is the path. You become the path."

We looked at each other, stunned. At the time I had no clue as to the meaning of what I had just said, but I knew it was true.

Many years later, I taught at Eastern Washington University. The class was organized in a nonlinear fashion, similar to this book. In class we talked about anything: love, sex, death, abuse, money, fear, drugs, games, aspirations, god (with both a large and small g). We played hide-and-go-seek in an empty building. We played duck, duck, goose. We played capture the flag. We learned how to dance. Anything to help imbue our writing and our lives with feeling.

One quarter I had a student—a good writer and thinker— who often asked, especially when we greatly deviated from the subject of writing, "What's the point?" I usually had no answer, and so merely smiled and shrugged. Sometimes I said, "To have fun," and sometimes, "I don't know."

On the last day of class I stood at the chalkboard while they called out memories of the class time we'd spent together. I wrote them down as fast as I could, covering board after board. Finally we began to slow, and I heard the same student ask, "What's the point?"

I turned around, and the class laughed. I laughed, too, but before I could shrug a woman slammed her hand down on her desk and cried, "I get it! The point is that he can't tell us the point. The point is that we have to get it ourselves!"

I walked to the empty seat next to hers, sat down, placed the chalk on her desk, and said, "There's nothing else I can teach you. Thank you. Have fun."

I was raised a fundamentalist Christian. Many of my best memories happened because of our belief that one should not participate in secular activities on Sabbath, that is, from Saturday sundown to Sunday sundown. No shopping, no television, no movies, no sports (although made-up games were acceptable in my family). No books were allowed that weren't either about the Bible or nature.

The observance of Sabbaths was admittedly a little too legalistic in its implementation. We often counted the minutes till sundown on Sunday so we could watch the end of a baseball game or pick up a novel, and my siblings often left early for movies on the rationale that the theaters were in the shade of a mountain, and therefore the movie did not technically begin till after the sun had gone down on the spot where they sat.

Fortunately my family did not adhere to the dictionary definition of secular, which is pertaining to the world or to things not spiritual or sacred. It is a horrifying definition. But the natural world was considered sacred enough in my family to permit me to take long, rambling walks among Creation, for which I am thankful. In retrospect