Sitting on the train in my morning commute in, I was gripped by our paradoxical inheritance as a people.

As humans, we have a near infinite capacity for imagining. We have near limitless empathy, or the ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes. Almost any idea we might come across, we can envision.

Bowtied pink elephant on a tricycle playing the trumpet down Broadway.

There, point proven.

Yet we are inextricably bound by our bodies. While I'm on the train, my perspective has no choice but to move wherever the train takes my body. As much as I'd like to stay there, on the bridge, looking out over the water, fluttering in the sky, my locus of consciousness gets pulled away. There is nothing I can do about this. It is and always will be. It's part of my inheritance as a human.

So, with that as my morning musing, what a lovely serendipity to in the evening discover this ambrosia from Mary Oliver. In the wake of her lover's ("M.") passing, she reflects on who she was to her, who they were together (Discovered thanks to Maria Popova's brain pickings email nestled in my inbox):

M. had will and wit and probably too much empathy for others; she was quick in speech and she did not suffer fools. When you knew her she was unconditionally kind. But also, as our friend the Bishop Tom Shaw said at her memorial service, you had to be brave to get to know her.

...

She was vastly knowledgeable about people, about books, about the mind’s emotions and the heart’s.

But later, watching M. when she was taking photographs, and watching her in the darkroom, and no less watching the intensity and openness with which she dealt with friends, and strangers too, taught me what real attention is about. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles. I think of this always when I look at her photographs, the images of vitality, hopefulness, endurance, kindness, vulnerability… We each had our separate natures; yet our ideas, our influences upon each other became a rich and abiding confluence.

[…]

I don’t think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my own darkness. Nor have I ever abandoned it — those early signs that so surely lead toward epiphanies. And yet, and yet, she wanted me to enter more fully into the human world also, and to embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] never expressed impatience with my reports of the natural world, the blue and green happiness I found there. Our love was so tight.

Reading this, my heart can't help but swell in appreciation for Ash, my own M., in so many, many ways.

There really is no feeling like this one - the one you get when the words of an author so mirror your own feelings for another, and are expressed with such microscopic, universal clarity.

I certainly enjoy when, in the throws of a reading binge, the words of an author jump off the page and explode in my mind's eye, shapes and colors and people dancing so effortlessly. But even more do I enjoy the occasion, rarer by my estimation, when the author's words no longer remain theirs, when they so sharply resonate in my soul that they wholly become my own.

At these times, I'm something like a grand piano, the words my keys. In a vacuum they are unremarkable - laying there before me in black and white, static. Yet by the small and alchemical act of impressing my attention upon them, one by one and together, they produce a reaction so influential. They send tendrils whizzing and whirring about underneath the surface. They actually produce significant physical response.

In these moments, the words are mine but they're not mine. They're memories - snapshots of episodes we've shared, the author and me, through the hallowed lens of our own bodies.