The Tao of Sparrow

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A poet, his bathtub, and waking up twice

One morning recently I woke up and looked out a third-floor window at a treetop full of sparrows. My feline companion cackled at them while my human compa–era slept. A thousand miles to the east, a man named Sparrow wrote a poem and sent it my way electronically:

Earth
The earth is a muffin, still warm inside.

After years of not writing this poem, Sparrow imagined it and gave it wings. And after decades of not knowing Sparrow, I sensed a rara avis who at the same time seemed intimately familiar.

I "met" Sparrow by reading his "Kite Soup" in Ascent magazine (see page 77), which in turn led me to America: A Prophecy: A Sparrow Reader, published last year by Soft Skull Press. Reading it confirmed my sense of encountering a co-wonderer. Sparrow's proverbs -- such as "A houseboat's furniture need not float," and "You can't catch a spider in a spider web" -- struck me as both wise and absurd.

A substitute teacher who's never made more than $11,000 in a year, Sparrow lives with his wife, Violet Snow, in a village in the Catskills where he takes baths, talks with friends, studies Hebrew, practices Ananda Marga tantric yoga, and -- like me -- watches the sky and reads magazines he finds in the trash.

He is also, for me, one of the rarest of writers: one who gives expression to something akin to my own philosophy, which I've called "curvyedge." The opposite of extremism and dogmatism, curvyedge is the tendency to move toward balance, articulated by such wise fools as Agatha Christie ("When I see the red signal -- I can't help forging ahead"), Mohandas Gandhi ("Strength of numbers is the delight of the timid"), Ralph Waldo Emerson ("A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds"), Groucho Marx ("I don't want to belong to a club that will accept me as a member"), and Ursula Le Guin ("To light a candle is to cast a shadow").

How amazing to meet a kindred spirit. Already awake, we awaken a second time to a world of new possibility, energy, and inspiration. Suddenly play takes on the importance of work and everything gains breadth, depth, and new layers of meaning. From where does the energy come when old souls meet? We are all connected, but some of us are especially connected.

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