> night walks different from the day
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: things noticed on walks.
Hello friend,
In Nanjing, summer 2016, my host family and I would walk after dinner. They lived along the Yangtze River, a river I’d really only known through my Chinese school and history textbooks. We wouldn’t walk for any more than a half hour or so, but I remember the river. How it would rain. Often we walked through a nearby mall, newly constructed, all fluorescent lights and statues.
I was thinking of those mall lights this week, when we passed through a temple full of lanterns and rainbow twinkle lights. It’s not what I expected of a temple, to be lit up like that at night. There was a grid of squares that lit up when you walked on them. It was mostly kids on those squares. My roommate and I were the only grown people.
I like walks, the way night walks different from the day. In Nanjing, I walked to and from the bus stop to get to school. After my host mom walked me to the bus stop for a week or so, I started going by myself. They lived near the terminal stop of one bus line, and I would walk to the stop in the morning, the opposite way from the mall. On my walk to the bus, I passed by a military base of some sort, all high gates and little tanks behind. Sometimes there were men lugging sandbags across the road, to protect against flooding.
What I like about walks is the noticing, the finding of things that works somehow against the fears of being in a new place. Those like, the fear of being too much of a tourist, or the fear of staying in all day and missing out. Or, when walking around a familiar place, I like how everything becomes more interesting. Back in Indiana, that was things like finding the “Yard of the Week” signs in the subdivision across from mine, or happening upon a flower garden.
During my first few years of college, I felt like I needed to use every minute. I would do my readings while walking across campus, staring down at a book while going to class. Now I appreciate the not-thinking times—during commutes, on the train, while crocheting or knitting, walking.
Or maybe it’s not that I’m not thinking, but rather that I’m paying more attention. It reminds me of an interview with Ada Limón that I heard this week:
What is the experience…if you’re not always having the epiphany…Because most of my epiphanies, and most of my poetry truly is almost always just saying, we’re all gonna die. Let’s be grateful. Once I kind of realized that, I kinda was like, okay, well, then, what is it to maybe work against epiphany, or maybe work with time in a way that’s different so that it feels maybe on some levels, that there’s not necessarily an epiphany, but there’s an ongoingness.
I remember talking about something similar with one of my thesis advisors, about wanting to wrap a piece up with a tidy bow, how to resist that impulse.
I’m thinking about the noticing in Ada Limón’s poem, “What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use,” and how it’s about making a big deal of what gets noticed, and then not. Wondering if there is epiphany in there, or work against it:
All these great barns out here in the outskirts,
black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.
They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.
You say they look like arks after the sea’s
dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,
and I think of that walk in the valley where
J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,
low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,
and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,
woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.
So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,
its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name
though we knew they were really just clouds—
disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.
In this café, one of the owners is comparing different cups with a vendor at a table across from me. And now the owner is realizing that she was classmates with the customer that just walked in. They’re all, “It’s been a while!” and “This is my husband, we’re co-owners” and “When did you move here?” and “Just this past week.” But maybe this isn’t for me to share.
I’m drinking jasmine tea right now but it’s not like any jasmine tea I know. I can see the flowers, all white and a bit limp, floating. Floral, and sweet in the way that fake sugar is sweet. It’s a sweetness I can’t quite trust or believe.
Cheers,
Tiffany