i went uptown

Sometimes, when I try and think about the scope of the universe, I feel like my brain breaks a little. Everything just sort of slips sideways, completely out of my grasp. Trying to hold onto a fixed idea of life, of god, of time, of why anything is happening at all and is there any way to make things different than they are—it’s like trying to hold onto the sands of Rockaway beach. The ocean always comes for the sand, the way it comes and washes away our tenuous attempts at cosmic understanding.

The 1 train shakes as it leaves the tunnel at 116th, briefly showering us passengers with sunlight until we go back below at 135th st. The train is moving in a straight line; it is the earth that rises and falls around it as we climb our way into Inwood. I exit the station through the emergency doors and take a moment to reorient myself—sometimes emerging from the subway in new york city is like stepping into another part of the world entirely. They say it takes three days for your brain to adjust to a new way of seeing, three days for the world to go right-side up again. I walk west towards the park.

It takes no more than ten minutes to arrive at the cloisters at the top of the hill, but upper Manhattan has that way of making you feel like you’ve escaped the city entirely, maybe even traveled to a different timeline. I look out at the Hudson, at the Palisades on the other side of the water. The large stalks of white snakeroot that have sprung up in the cracks of the pavement after so many days of rain smile at me as I walk past them. It is spring and there is a happiness in the air in the city that is palpable, just like every year after we awaken from the hibernation of winter.

As I round the corner I see the them: beautiful stone structures that evoke the feeling of a medieval French monastery: austere, yet welcoming. There is a muted quality to sound once you step inside, no matter how many people are present. It’s impossible not to feel the ghosts of nuns brush past you in the garden, see the shadow figure of a priest as you walk through the vaulted halls. Except the cloisters are not cloisters, nor have they ever been, though who’s to say what the future holds. It has always only been an art museum, cobbled together from architectural elements either taken or re-created from their namesakes back in France. Bought and paid for by one of the richest families in the United States, and probably the world. Rich enough to ship great stone structures across the ocean and rebuild them at the top of a hill in New York City, trying to create an illusion of something that never was. That is the beauty and the deceit of a place like this, designed to invoke a cathartic feeling in us that we chase endlessly into the future—even our experience has been curated. It makes me wonder if a thing is still what it claims to be if not used for its original purpose. Is a ship still a ship if it never touches water?

The stone halls are filled with statues of the Virgin in varying states; her eyes follow me where ever I go. When her gaze becomes too heavy I step outside into the garden, see plants familiar and new and try to superimpose a vision of a life here that could have existed but never did, devoted only to god and the garden. Sometimes I wish that I had been born into Catholicism. Sometimes I wish I was part of a tradition larger than myself. I wish I knew how to pray the rosary, or what catechism really means. To have a solid thread to hold onto, a clear pathway to god and a ritual to hold onto. But my religious upbringing has been fragmented, diverse. Discrete sects of christianity with no coherent community, now more or less abandoned now as I try to make my own sense of the world. My hand brushes against the stalks of woad, it’s sweet yellow flowers concealing the the blue hues of dye it creates.

The word catholic means universal. Encompassing all. It seems fitting for the only religion who has a leader the whole world watches to have chosen a name such as this. I felt I could see in Pope Francis a true student of jesus, and one can see throughout his life all the ways he tried to walk in the footsteps of his teacher. A man who said he likes to think of hell as empty, who had the enduring faith in the goodness of humankind, despite bearing witness to all the suffering we have created. Now we have Leo, who is echoing his predecessor’s calls for peace, and one can’t help but hope that we will listen. I’ve never been much one to listen to any authority, but I think of how comforting it could be to have a leader to look up to in times such as these.

But are these times so very different than the times before? If we know that time is not linear, in fact, the times have always been like this, will always be like this. The wheel of samsara means something different with non-linear time, because it becomes so truly inescapable. What kind of quantum leap do we need to make to entire a new state of reality? And is it even possible? Or will there only ever be this—different clothes and costumes, but the play is still fundamentally the same. I think about this art museum disguising itself as a site of religious significance, built not out of reverence to god but by the desires of a billionaire.

Nevertheless, it is beautiful. When I round the corner towards the unicorn tapestries my heart flutters and I’m overcome with the excitement of a little kid. I cry, just a little, at the sight of a tapestry famous to me as the cover of the book In Calabria, which still sits on my shelf. The unicorn rests in the garden, surrounded by creatures and flowers. As a young girl I never noticed it was held captive by the fence surrounding it, instead focusing only on its magic.

What is a unicorn but a wish? A wish to see the magic that hides in the periphery of our vision, dancing on the edges of reality. Something we hunt for, yet so rarely feel as though we find it. When I was a child my favorite movie was The Last Unicorn—I used to beg my mother to keep renting that worn VHS tape from the library. I would watch it over and over, never tiring of the butterfly’s rhymes or Schmendrick the magician’s antics, never ceasing to be scared when the Red Bull makes his way on screen. As a little girl I would imagine myself as the unicorn-turned-princess, beautiful and immortal and full of mystery. Now as a woman I see myself in Molly Grue. Back then I thought she must be so old, now I realize she might be barely older than myself. She leaves her band of travelers to cross paths the unicorn and in doing so cries out in despair and anger—

Where have you been? Where were you when I was one of those innocent young maidens you always come to. How dare you come to me now, when I am this.

We want the mystical thing to happen when we are young and pretty; it seems tawdry that something magical should come to us when we are middle-aged, out of the bloom of youth, weighed down by the baggage of our years. Time might not be linear but our body’s relationship to it is; we move in straight line towards death. As children we have an innate understanding of the veil that separates our living world from the great everything-ness that lies beyond, but as we get older we get more afraid. When I was a kid I used to look for fairy circles in the forest. I used to talk to the trees as I sat under them—I didn’t need anyone to convince me that the world was alive and full of magical potential, and I didn’t feel any fear.

I pass through the Treasury quickly, the last room left to explore before I leave. The antiquities are stunning, and their craftmanship is undeniable, delicate filigrees of gold and silver, illuminated manuscripts no bigger than the palm of your hand. It is a very human impulse, I think, to create beautiful things for god. I want to believe that everything can be an expression for our love for god, because the sacred is everywhere we look for it. The room is packed and I only want to be outside again, walking the curled stone path that will lead me back into Fort Tyron park. I try to meander but it feels like the only pace I’m capable is fast. I don’t stopped walking until I pass a crush of foxglove to my left, winking at me from the hillside.

I don’t really call myself a Christian anymore, though I do still think of myself as a woman of god. The distinction being, in my mind, that a christian has accepted Jesus as their primary spiritual teacher, the benchmark against which their actions are measured. I’ve always had difficulty being loyal to just one teacher; I’ve always felt that everything and everyone could be someone I could learn from. I struggle with dogma, though I am disciplined, and I’ve never liked being told what to do and if I am being told what to do I like a thorough explanation of why it must be so. I would make a terrible Catholic, I’m pretty sure. I don’t call myself a Christian because a religion is not just a belief in god but the building of a community, the practice of belief in connection with others, I feel fairly certain. Anyone can have a relationship with god, but it means something different to be materially engaged with other people who are on the same spiritual path as you are. And I tried, but I didn’t hear the call.

When I was young I considered becoming a nun. It is a thought I still sometimes have, when modern life is feeling particularly taxing. The dream of a life that is undeniably simple, that simplicity being the foundation of what it means to be alive. Not a preacher, nor a priest—not someone seeking to speak, to guide, or to advise. Not a bishop or a cardinal, so tied up in the business of faith, tethered to desk more than a pulpit. Definitely not a pope, to have the weight of one million eyes watching. A nun, and my days would be spent praying, or outside perhaps, or running a food distribution program. Rooted in the presence, in soil, in hands clasped together and rustle of cotton on tile floors. No flocks to tend to but a garden full of flowers.

When I was young I felt like people told me I had to have goals and so I tried to make them but the truth is they were all lies, and even now at 31 years old I can’t say I have a single concrete goal for my future. It is too far away, too abstract. I’ve never been able to form a coherent vision for what could be, instead I find myself worrying why I can never get my vining plants to produce any fruit. It feels silly to me to have any goals, and yet it feels silly to say that you have none. Even the things I am working at, there never seems to be any working towards—we do what makes us happy and we take what comes with humility. Approach life with curiosity and be constantly amazed at the surprises that come knocking at your door.

At the opposite end of the park you have to walk down the stairs to access the A train station. Once inside, you have to take an elevator even further down. In my first year of living in the city, I would joke that the last place I would want to die was in the subway. Hidden underground with the trash and the rats, the stagnant air and the asbestos that fills the platform as the trains rolls to a stop. I wanted to die outside, in the sunshine, preferably left in a shallow grave until the cathedral of my bones has broken down into the soil, transmuting myself into something new.

I catch myself thinking in dualities, as if life is a spectrum of opposites. Light and dark. Good and evil. God, and the devil. Most days I don’t think the devil exists, that he is just a metaphor for the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see, the dirty underground. Some days I think God doesn’t exist, the he too is a metaphor. But god always exists, in the lowercase, and somehow there is no other word I have yet to encounter that captures the truth of what that means. I barely know what it means myself. Some days I feel we are so scared to accept that god is an ineffable mystery that we continually try to fix it into a single point, a single human human-like figure that can lead us where we think we ought to be going. We use God as the bullet in the gun of our violent beliefs, and the whole concept empties out. It becomes an echo of what it should be, tainted by our small, linear understandings.

In 1964 scientists proposed the existence of the Higgs boson, an elusive subatmoic particle with no spin that could explain why matter has mass, which would prove the theory of the Higgs field, the theoretical fascia that holds the universe together. In 2012 they confirmed its existence, one step closer to getting at the why of the universe. It’s sometimes referred to as “the god particle,” and though the name was mostly a joke it has a certain poetry to it, this mysterious boson they hope will illuminate some secret of the cosmos. Even though I don’t really believe in God I like to think that the universe has a sense of humor, maybe that’s physics. Maybe physics is just a poem written by god on the back of an old receipt, the kind that flies out of your wallet when you’re taking out your metro card, stuck on the sticky floor until it catches someone’s eye and they bend down to pick it up.

Maybe there is no point to anything, that the whole universe is just god sorting itself out, trying things on, learning what it means to exist in different forms. It astounds the mind what we’ve chosen to create, what reality we’ve chosen to live in. But maybe we never had a choice, the infinite moments of simultaneous time falling around us like confetti, like rain. I turned to religion because I though God could help me with my anger, with my grief. When I wanted to be filled with hate I thought God was a path to forgiveness, and when I felt alone I turned to those who also sought to know Him. There were plenty of answers to be found there, an abundance of kindness and direction. But I turned away, walked back down into the tunnel and asked myself if I was capable in a courageous trust in god’s love, if I could use love as a compass to guide me, for if I understand myself to be a reflection of god then surely the answer must already be there.

I will probably never be catholic but that doesn’t mean I can’t be a nun, albeit perhaps only metaphorically. I can make my body into an altar, rather than a sacrifice, and talk to god as I talk to myself, joyfully and amongst the purple blooms of the comfrey that lines the edges of my garden. Sometimes I get so caught up in the why of it all I forget to focus on the what, so lost in the cosmic sauce I become blind to the truth of the moment, of its suffering, of my own capacity to ease even the smallest fraction of that suffering. I don’t expect that it will ever be eradicated, that we are somehow in a battle that has either ending or resolution. There is nothing to win. We just keep reminding ourselves not to look away, for what good are our eyes if not to see, what good are our hearts if not to love.

On the train back to Brooklyn I spot a white slip of paper out of the corner of my eye. I bend down to pick it up. It reads, in a feminine cursive script: hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello —