At a church in the Tenderloin, people sleep in the pews. The only sound, walking through is the shhh of a deacon, should you start to whisper. The silence is moving. The stillness profound. 

Once a month they offer haircuts in the courtyard. I used to see them, through the fence, barbers bent over the heads of the unhoused, so many nights of the sidewalk’s indignity, falling away for a moment, before building back up. Having spent the last few years of my life moving mountains of money and real estate, building a system (which is a machination of people) to get as many homeless folks into housing as possible, I am moved by the intimacy of this action now. There is no system between a barber and the person who sits in their chair. Nor, one could just as easily say, will a haircut end homelessness. But that is not the choice before us. 

Saint Boniface went to Germany and cut down Donar’s Oak, a tree sacred to the pagans. When the tree fell, some say, it split into four pieces and formed a cross. They used the wood to build a church, and in so doing, lost the grove, where god lived. “It is the colonizer’s mind,” my lover tells me, “that looks at a mountain and sees gravel.” I am trying to be less like firewood these days, having spent many years split up and parsed out, relating to myself as object, and in so doing, becoming scarce and finite. Unlike firewood, a tree doesn’t have to be good. Nor does it have to be enough. A tree simply has to be a tree, and in its treeness, fulfills its purpose. Divine, ordained, natural, however you like to say. It gives us air. It breaths and we breathe. 

“It is sheer arrogance, mere hubris” says Samuel Delany, “for human beings to say they believe in something they call a god when they are precisely the people who are incapable of believing that other people are human and have the same wants and fears and desires and needs as they do, as soon as those people begin to appear the least little bit different culturally from themselves.” “My spiritual energy” he says, “goes into believing in the humanity of all of my fellow folk on the planet and the importance of my very distant cousins, such as grass, oaks, mushrooms, not to mention fish, bats, dogs, and birds, of what lives within my horizon and what lives beyond it.” So. Let us begin our believing. 

In the midst of mourning, queue the songs of our youth. They are twinkling, hopeful, garishly optimistic. Suddenly, we feel young again, which is inherently a fleeting feeling, one that must by definition depart, but can always miraculously return again. A surprise of life amidst a landscape of death. It only takes five days of rain for the ground to turn green again, even after years of drought. So, too, may we return to ourselves, and find that so many years later, so much madness and despair, tricks and trades and disenchantment, the songs still sparkle like they once did, touch the part that wants to come alive again. The heart, silently wired to hope, awaiting a thumb to strum it. Listen to the net work of nature.

I cut my hair. Lose length, not growth. A fish as old as stone stares at me in the aquarium. His face is one I know, not far from my own. “You’re worrying about your haircut” he says to me, and I turn to the jellies. They show their elegance with nothingness, a see through slip of electricity and intelligence. Their cells twinkle at anyone watching. Before you leave the house, remove one accessory, like an exoskeleton. “When I die, I want you to feed me to them” I tell my lover, and he reminds me that they don’t eat people. (My arrogance, my hubris). “Someone will” I say, and wink at the tiger shark swimming by.

Think about a death. Your own. You have grown quite attached, in every possible sense of the word, to a body. If not the source, it is at least the home to all of your pain and pleasure. It houses your hatred and your delight. You are fed and rested and strengthened and sickened by way of it. It torments and assuages you, or at least facilitates that range of possibilities. You believe, even if you espouse otherwise, that you would be nothing without it. And in an instant, likely violent and void of choice, you will be jettisoned from every body you’ve ever known, including your own. And much as you cannot imagine what comes next, you may not remember what came before. You will not live there anymore.

Think about a birth. Your own. You had grown quite attached, in every possible sense of the word, to a body. If not the source, it was at least the home to all of your pain and pleasure. It housed your growth and your struggle. It kept you contained and fed and held. Or at least facilitated that range of possibilities. You could not imagine being anything without it. And in an instant, it spit you out, in a flood of violence and a void of choice. And with a shove, a slice and a slap, you were jettisoned from the only body you’d ever known. And just as you could not imagine what would come next, you will never remember that part before. You do not live there anymore. 

Every exit, an opening. Perhaps this was already obvious to you, but it took a certain intimacy with death for it to become so clear to me. And still, we have much to learn about each other, death and me. It’s a relationship that will last a lifetime, maybe longer. We are always leaving and arriving. The present is a precipice, not a plateau.

I have one more thing to say, and it’s about the butterflies. When a caterpillar goes into a cocoon, it digests itself down to a primordial goo. Inside, it floats as a fluid of imaginal cells; as in cells so simple and full of possibility they can become anything. A reassembly occurs, and from the chrysalis emerges a completely new form, made up of entirely the same parts. And somewhere in those cells, is the genetic memory of a map, that tells it to migrate along the same route its predecessors have for centuries. And even though no single butterfly has ever lived to complete the full journey, every butterfly knows where to go without knowing where it’s going. Down to the grove, it knows where to go. 

When Saint Boniface cut the sacred oak, perhaps it knew it would one day return, in the form of a pew, to offer rest to those who worship under an open sky. We only see to the horizon. Believe here.