shimmer

In Robert Boswell's book  The Half-Known World:  On Writing Fiction, he writes about "magical moments in fiction" where the familiar is made strange.  The successful writer creates an alternative world or different dimension for the reader to enter into because "there are times when it seems there must be some other way of living, moments when the utterly ordinary takes on a measure of strangeness."  He goes on to say that in order to enter into these alternative worlds there must be a physical or tangible "embodiment ... a shimmer (or bridge) [that] exceeds it's physical definition."

I can pretty easily make the leap from fiction to all experiences of literature, art, music -- and then to clouds, wind, fog, the curl inside of a wave, the arc of a tree limb, grass swaying in the wind, all types of rocks, the ruffles of flower petals and undersides of leaves, weathered bones, lilac perfume, birdsong at dawn...  As sleep is to dreaming -- a portal to dreamworlds -- so is the potential in everyday experiences.  If we recognize them as points of shimmer we might find ourselves liberated from the common, transported by them into the waiting other worlds.  

So this is my passion.  Finding the threshold.  The shimmer.  The next world.  Jonathan Franzen said that "one half of passion is obsession, the other half is love."  My passion for wandering is divided into my obsession with finding the shimmer and the promise of falling in love with what lies just beyond the surface of the moment.  The movement inward, the leap upward, the whisper of air between touch -- and then the slip into that perfect unknown.