Peace Is Underrated

Here is the question I cannot answer: is this fear, or is this choice?

I have been asking it for five centuries. I have not been asking it continuously - there are decades where I do not think about it at all, decades where the work is enough and the dead are enough and the oath requires what it requires and the question stays underneath everything else. Then something moves the underneath. Abuela, last time. The Solomon Note, the cosmological signature of what came for her. The question surfaces and I sit with it and I do not answer it, because I genuinely do not know.

The facts: I backed away from a light in a canyon in the 1520s. I have not gone back. I have been in that general region of the dead corridor more than once since then - three centuries at Sivan Va’aki, which is not far - and I have not gone looking for the canyon. I have not sent the dead to find it. I have not consulted the Huhugam, who are the closest to that canyon of any dead I have had long access to, about what they know of it.

I tell myself: there is work here. The oath. The people who rely on what I maintain. The dead who need tending. The Rez, the node, Sivan Va’aki and Baboquivari and the ley line between. If I am not here, who is here? This is true. None of it is false.

But I have been here for two hundred years and the work has not become less and the question has not resolved and I am aware, at the level where I know things without having to think them through, that the work is also a reason. Not a reason I invented. A genuine reason. That is the problem with genuine reasons: they function as reasons even when they are also reasons you are using for something else.

What is the something else?

The light I could not approach. The stone that repels water does not think about the water; I said this in a Note I wrote, or told, or remembered aloud - about the canyon, about the two figures below, about how there is no judgment in a stone that repels water. The stone does not think about the water. And yet.

The stone is not afraid of the water. The stone is simply stone. What I felt at the edge of that radius was not fear, exactly. It was the recognition of an incompatibility. I am what I am; that thing is what it is; the two cannot be in the same space. That is physics. That is the order of the world.

But Abuela walked through physics.

She was what she was, which included a complete and specific human death and a forced embrace and the specific weight of what Solomon had done to her. She was not less complicated than me. She was not more saintly, as far as I can read the shape of what she was from the impression she left in the dead. She was a grandmother with opinions and a complicated relationship with the supernatural world she had been moved into without consent. She walked through.

Refusing or deferring. Those are the two words I sit with. Refusing is a position. Deferring is not yet a position - it is the space before a position, the space where you have all the information and are still in the holding of it.

Five centuries is a long time to be in the holding.

I do not know which one I am doing. I have tried to know, in the still hours, in the hours when the dead have been tended and Phin has been maintained and the node is quiet and I have no immediate task. I cannot find the bottom of the question. It does not resolve into a thing I can name.

Peace, I have found, is not the same as the resolution of that question. It is what you have when the question is held properly rather than suppressed or fled or answered falsely. I have peace. I have the desert and the oath and the dead I tend and the two hundred years of doing what this territory requires. I have Standing Deer, who is the best lens I have found in a century. I have the work.

The question stays open.

The open question and the holding of it, alma. The light and the five centuries of turning away.