What I’m Thinking About
Did you know the word conspiracy means “to breathe together”? Con + spirare. Together + to breathe. Isn’t that beautiful? A word we associate with paranoia and tinfoil hats and shadowy figures in parking garages, and at its root it’s just… people, breathing in the same direction.
Which is to say: I’ve been thinking about espionage lately. Not the Hollywood kind, but the quieter kind — the practice of reading between lines, of asking who benefits, of following the thread. Follow the money, they said about Watergate. But what are we really following? Not truth exactly. Not always facts. Something muddier. A current. This current is the currency.
I told my students earlier this week that a thinking person has to adopt an attitude of non-attachment — intellectually, politically, spiritually. You don’t get attached to what you learn or what you think you’ve learned, because the information ecosystem is muddy. It has always been muddy. Watergate taught us this decades ago. The Pentagon Papers before that. Later, Iran-Contra. Whitewater. Wikileaks. Now Epstein. Maduro. Greenland. The muddiness isn’t new. Maybe we have more water now. And more dirt.
And then, just yesterday, my son was listening to a recording of Langston Hughes talking and reading about the Mississippi River, its place in the lives of Black Americans. Big Muddy, this river is sometimes called. Hughes’s poem (and the occasion for it: a plane ride to visit his father in Mexico City, this great vein of silt and water flowing thousands of feet below him) holds room for that symbolic muddiness: A river of life. A river to Hell. A border, a baptism, a burial ground. Awesome and awful at once. It isn’t ever any one thing. It can’t be. And maybe it shouldn’t be.
Maybe that’s the posture I’m after this month: not certainty, not skepticism, but something more like wading. You’re in the river. It’s murky. You can feel the current but you can’t see the bottom. You keep moving anyway. You hold your breath, your knowing, lightly, because the water’s going to shift its shape, whether you’re ready for it or not. Answers are elusive, and the current takes you where it will.
What I’m Reading
- The Nobel Lecture of Octavio Paz. Paz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990, and his lecture is unlike any acceptance speech I’ve encountered. It doesn’t argue; it spirals. It’s associative, expansive, cosmic, historical — it moves from the particular to the universal and back again without ever pausing to announce the turn. He’s working at the intersection of conservation and progress, insisting that tradition isn’t the enemy of advancement but its necessary soil. He problematizes the word progress itself, asking what we lose in the rush to arrive somewhere we haven’t clearly defined. Reading it now, in this information landscape, I’m struck by how the lecture performs the kind of thinking I was describing above: muddied, multi-directional, refusing clean categories. Here is a Nobel laureate writing a poem disguised as a position paper. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
- A Thousand Beginnings and Endings: 15 Retellings of Asian Myths and Legends (Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, eds.). A young adult anthology, which means it operates with a different kind of hospitality than Paz’s lecture. Where Paz is one towering intellect spiraling outward, this is a chorus. Fifteen voices, each holding one thread of myth, legend, and cultural memory and handing it forward in a new shape. The territory is similar to Paz — the cosmic and the personal, the old stories and the new tellings — but the mode is communal rather than solitary. I’m reading both of these at the same time and finding that they illuminate each other. One voice trying to hold everything versus many voices each holding one piece. Both associative. Both expansive. Not different rivers but separate tributaries.
Seven Invitations
The goal here is always GENERATIVE, never prescriptive. These are invitations, not assignments.
- Map your information river. Where does your news come from? Your ideas? Your opinions? Trace the current backward — from a belief you hold to the source (or sources) that fed it. Don’t judge what you find. Just follow the water.
- Write about a time you were wrong about something you were sure of. Not a small thing. Something that mattered. What did it feel like to carry the wrong certainty? What did it feel like when it broke? Write freely. This doesn’t have to be anything well-shaped or even coherent.
- Conspiracy = “to breathe together.” Spend five minutes breathing with someone — a partner, a child, a friend, a pet. Synchronize. Then journal for ten minutes about what you noticed. What are you conspiring toward?
- Write a poem or short prose piece in which a river is two contradictory things at once. A lullaby and a threat. A border and a bridge. A baptism and a burial. Don’t resolve the contradiction — let the water hold it.
- Retell a story you were told as a child — but change one crucial detail. A family story, a fairy tale, a myth, a lie. Alter the current and see what new meaning floods in.
- Go somewhere with moving water. A creek, a fountain, a rain gutter, a faucet. Sit with it for ten minutes. Don’t write. Don’t think about writing. Just listen to what the water is doing.
- Practice non-attachment to one opinion for a whole day. Pick something you believe firmly. Don’t abandon it — just hold it loosely. Notice what happens in your body, your conversations, your thinking when you loosen your grip.