It was another leap, taking perhaps years, before the idea of separation I had within myself ended and I was a unit, body, mind and the other part that may be what is called “soul,” just as the crow and the pencil and the paper and I had been the same thing. I am not certain when that knowledge came, or how, although I know it was gradual and not some sudden realization.

At some point that winter, I began to keep a journal. It seemed in the beginning there was something important about the writing of things, something that might hold onto the reality of events. I guess I thought a journal would give a kind of coherence there hadn’t been before, so that when I read back over it, what it contained might come together in a pattern that I would see and could experience again. I wrote about the drawings and my body and what I saw; I wrote about breakdowns and becoming sane, and the mysterious awesome moment of knowing; and I wrote about the squirrels and the cardinals and the unbroken snow in the mornings. I wrote that when an act was right, it was preceded by a sense of rightness. The instincts, I wrote, could not be wrong.

I learned: that words were not adequate for describing what I was understanding that winter; and that it was useless to go back in search of a pattern. I would write what was happening, clearly, I thought, and later when I read it again I would find the words flat, for they could never keep up with the changes.

Still, understanding that at last, I wrote for the pleasure of it, randomly, no longer trying to keep pace, immersed in the words that would not say what I wanted them to say, and that I would never read again. There was so much that was new during a time that I had thought might be simple or peaceful or dangerous. I tried to put something of that into the journal, tried to explain the joy. I was consumed, so that I saw vividly everything there was, and at the same time noticed nothing around me.

Until one day I realized that the day was longer than others had been, that I was writing more without lighting the coal oil lamps, and for the first time in — how long? — I looked outside. Then I walked outside. There was a difference in the air, a knowledge that winter was coming to an end, and it was almost spring.

12

12

The new season drew me more and more away from the winter place, taking me to see what was happening outside. But the learning of the winter stayed with me, changing the way I saw things, changing what I saw.