It is late and we are on the sofas with the window open the rain doesn't come in. I already know he is a listener. A spaciousness is felt, so the words come lightly rising off the throat and have somewhere to land. At some point he says he sat for a long time and met a lizard that came towards him it was green, red and blue and without realising what he was doing, the words gutted out 'do I have to die?' The lizard said no. Later I think maybe a few years after, the valley burnt in a whole night. Did you register it in your system, I ask? Yes, he said, and perhaps still am. He said it was a cut, and I heard 'seam', saw stitches and a ridge gently rising up out of the skin, a new terrain between the past and the future that was unfamiliar, as yet unknowable. I make an intention and agree to accept all that comes in, I tell him, whatever it may be. I know I am only beginning to touch the faintest edge of this work. Once the lizard visited me also. It pressed its body against the boulders and I read the imprints as script, licking them with my tongue to fully ingest their meaning. The mythic lives below and above and simultaneous to our time, I do not want to drag it into this realm too fully, and split it open with my literal decisions. How to track and not trap meaning? How to let it suspend and also realise, suspend and realise. I bob on the waves and surround myself with this ocean. Nothing he says is surprising. I also know the land will choose you, and the question is not is it or is it not happening, but rather, how much can I allow? And this is a hard question because I don't want to lose every knowable thing and maybe don't have to but sitting in the sting of this fear is most days too much. What becomes a pathway you expect, or others expect you to extend into? Now between us we have the lizard, and an atmosphere of relations that I understand has begun to form its own texture, its own terrain. I think of the seam and the forest alight with fire. I wonder if he thinks he is there, telling me about the lizard, and I am here, telling him about the lizard. I understand the lizard has dreamt us both from the space between its belly and the ground, and there we are nested and becoming, here, into language into another skin and this morning as I wake up knowing this I do not care if it is true or not, I care that it makes me think the first thing I must do is tell the lizard this, mark the day in some acknowledgement of having received it, heard it, felt it under my tongue and the words that spilt out because there it was, the lizard, pressing its belly to the ground as we unfolded into thought. So the day rolls on with a new question at my finger pads, a new listening to attend to: what would communicate this fully to the lizard? All I know is that after this the chain continues and living from one stone to the next is poetry, is solitude, is charged, is an exponential bloom, is cacophony, is service, is trouble, is a choice and no choice at all, is boring, is small, is distant, is fragile, is hilarious, is losing your mind, is a waste of time, is sacred, is distillation at its bluest tone.