disorientation ovenbird I dream that I have tattooed a secret symbol on the inside of my left wrist—a red square with a block of text beneath. As the ink scars my skin I try to sleep curled up on a musty bearskin rug. When I wake from the dream in which I couldn’t sleep, I don’t know what day it is. I’m not sure if I need to get the kids ready for school or if I can lie in the dark a little longer. My brain eventually discerns that it’s Sunday. I close my eyes and lose an hour. I wake again when the sun has risen. Then it’s time to make pancakes and eggs over-easy, it’s time to feed the dog and meet the day. I stare into the chaos of another morning. There’s an old clip of Leonard_Cohen giving an interview in which he says, “when I wake up in the morning my real concern is to discover whether I’m in a state of grace.” The commentator asks what Cohen means by this and he says, “a state of grace is a kind of balance that you find so you can ride the chaos around you. It’s not a matter of resolving the chaos because there’s something arrogant and war-like about putting the world in order. But it’s about sliding or skiing over the contours of chaos.” Cohen says that if he wakes and finds that he’s not in a state of grace he goes back to bed. As I reflect on this I find that his perspective is a perfect antidote to disorientation. His conception of grace does not require that order be found or imposed, it just requires a mind open to the possibility of sliding over the surface of the world and allowing an ease that comes from surrender. I am not an accomplished skier. I didn’t learn to ski until I was in my mid twenties and living in a place with mountains for the first time. I fell a lot. I was fighting the snow. I was putting myself in opposition to gravity, trying to rail against the forces that wanted to pull me over the cliff faces. I could get down a blue run, but certainly not with any grace. That changed on a day when I went skiing while sick with a cold. My body suddenly didn’t have the energy to fight and for the first time, I flew down that mountain. The feeling was one of complete and utter freedom. My body found a way to glide over every obstacle and the speed and the weightlessness were exhilarating. I suspect this is the feeling Leonard Cohen was pointing to when he talked about a state of grace. And so maybe I don’t have to be oriented. Maybe I don’t have to know exactly how I will get from one end of the day to the other, I just have to allow my mind to slip over everything, I have to let gravity take me. 251005 what's it to you? who go blather from