Büber dares to propose that dialogue between us can be as real and unrehearsed as our private moments of perception. But how to even try? Lu says simply, be sincere. But are they mad? Don’t they know what waits in the indifference of others? Don’t they know about the pain of not being heard? Don’t they—This is not about they, but about us, about you and me. And we, as our former selves before us, face these dilemmas, over and again: To go off like a Navajo warrior on some vision quest where no one, not even the history of our own mind, can interfere, and to return with trepidation and a burning at the base of our heart to share all the unspeakable things. And we, as all others before us, face the cost of doing neither. We can deny the quest for vision and so, never live clearly. And we can shy from saying the unspeakable and never sound fully. Or we can live impaired, inhibiting half of what we’re given, like a seer with one eye or a lover with one arm.

At best, we can inquire directly of each other and wash our questions like tired feet in the pool between us, careful, as Chuang Tzu warns, that:

if you probe, do so in a part

where (the) skin is not sore.

There is no not wanting the clarity. There is no escaping the confusion. There is no not wanting to be heard. There is no escaping the loneliness. At best, we can search alone together, bringing fuel to our common fire and food to our common pot. At best, we might wander a mountain in spring intoxicated with its flowering cherries, bursting in our solitude as the twelfth-century pilgrim Saigyo did when he wrote:

if only there were

someone else

willing to bear this loneliness—

side by side we’d build our huts.

Susan Means Lily

SUSAN MEANS LILY

While the rest of us work to remove

what stands in the way, you

are quietly burned by the intensities

few of us feel. When we drive by a

dead fawn, I see the carcass, but you

see the fawn as its life left its body.

You feel the deer breaking in air.

After a storm, I see the old maple

split, fascinated to see the inside of

anything. But you somehow feel the

tree snapping. Others whisper,

“She’s too sensitive.”

After all these years, I know you

have no choice. You’re one of those

born with no skin but your heart.

You can’t turn it off. It’s why I fell

in love with you. Why I learn from

you and care for you by turns.

How many times I’ve hovered,

wanting to see what you see and

feel some of what you feel. How

many times I’ve wanted to keep

you from the pain of having nothing