Persistently, we’re opened by crisis to discover the healing power of being that was living within us all along. In time, we’re all opened and, if blessed, we’re shaken from the thrill and comfort of our crisis . . .

. . . but Gene the Source is dead, an alcoholic done in by cancer, and there we were, surviving brothers, breathing heavily into anonymous phones—he at work over a desk full of papers, and me, in a noise-muffled wooden booth in the bowels of a shirt factory beyond the range of light. Gene the Source, gone, and in his wake, the fear that all survivors suppress—it could have been me.

Later that night I wore a new shirt to a restaurant on a river in the Adirondacks. The river had a bed of broken rocks, which made the water ribbon and foam in many directions, and as dusk thickened, the waxwings with their incredible speed and agility hovered, snapping up bugs in the fading light.

One rock toward the center of the current wouldn’t let me go. Half of the water was hitting the rock and coming back on itself trying hopelessly to buck the current and go back where it came from, while half was flowing over the rock smoothly, creating a silent film that simply moved on. I watched closely. The water approached as one mass and split into these two functions: curling back on itself whitely and slipping over and on clearly. Then I realized—this is how it works in us. The part that needs crisis in order to be real hits what it encounters, curls back on itself, and tries through resistance to return where it began, while, at the same time, the part in us that needs only to be slips over clearly and on. Both within us, happening at once.

On this side of dying, Robert and I have taken turns being the foam and the clearness, the turbulence and the quietude. Don’t we all carry both as we meet the days: part of us ready to stir up whitely at anything we meet, and our deeper self ready to come closer and glove what we experience clearly? Isn’t he in his drinking and I in my making—aren’t we, in those moods of imbalance, the foam stirring whitely back on itself at the cost of all else? Isn’t it the white agitation alone that ruins a life, whatever form it takes?

Enduring our own agitation, we must ask ourselves: Do we look for things to be troubled? Do we seek out troubled waters? Do we want to be whole?