Foiled again. Bright tinfoil chocolate Christmas mice, hanging by golden string tails. Foil wrappers flattened into 10G rodent squish. The foil inside of a pretzel-fish bag, of a Pringles can. Foiled again into eating things that aren’t strictly speaking food, to meet a deep-seated, deep-seeded need. Foiled and feathered. Toiled and tethered.
 
I sit at the table and think of foil mice. I bite a foil mouse into quarters, savoring the chocolate melting on my tongue. Foiled in the happiest of ways.
 
Foiled again into the holidays, which seem less serious with each passing year. While my parents take a nap, Timothy and I step out to the charity shops on Leith Walk for a box of assorted metallic ornaments and some strings of battery-powered lights: golden stars, nutcrackers, plain blue-white LEDs. We pull the fake ficus to the center of the living room and push fake gerber daisies (also latent in the apartment’s décor) between its boughs. A Christmas tree appears without planning or expectation, pulled together from What Is, shimmering with foil Christmas mice my parents brought          from Switzerland.
 
The holidays were never not-here. I unfold the sheet of golden paper I brought from home and wrap two re-painted thrift-store sheep, a box of chocolates, a small pot of witch’s balm, some tea, a felt heart, a found Santa Claus. It is all small, all emerging from the world’s pre-existing bounty. I love my parents without being foiled in this love.
 
My parents give us Bluetooth beanies with built in headlamps and earphones. They are silly, they are perfect, Fats Domino comes walking through woolly hats into our ears and hearts.
 
What if Christmas and all the other high holidays can be foiled simply by not falling into a trance of specialness? Ordinary-extraordinary, whether the calendar says December 25th, or March 11th, or anything. You can find beauty and generosity or lack and abandonment, anytime.
 
Foiled: one side is shiny silver and the other is a matte-gold mouse-face with little ears, whiskers, a nose, bright eyes. Wrap this around a vaguely peanut-shaped chunk of chocolate, add a string tail, and voilà! Foiled again.
 
We are all here for so short time. Do not wait for something special to occur, for some special place to arrive, for some special state that precludes boogers and dog poo riding the automatic gate back and forth without end. Do not wait for a barfless sidewalk. Do not expect the shoes to come in your size. Do not let perfection be foiled in these ways.
 
Foiled again: I think I am going over there and fail to notice that I have arrived. I do not walk in, do not accept the invitation, the gift, the advice of two old women traveling together. I grow irritated by what does not need to get under my skin. I forget the foil has two sides. I forget my tongue sits happily inside my mouth, even without a chocolate mouse melting on it. I hesitate when I don’t need to.
 
Foiled again: is it peanut butter or tunafish in there? Turkey with mayonnaise, or chicken salad? Who knows? Eat it fast, and you can make yourself a tinfoil hat to block FBI transmissions. Tinfoil hat, sandwich hat, overthinking the complexities of the world’s ongoing abundance.
 
Tinfoil crisps
Tinfoil Easter eggs
Tinfoil twists of salt for hill-walking
Tinfoil potatoes in the campfire
Tinfoil reflectors for tanning the underside of your chin
Accordion tinfoil windshield covers for roasting-hot beach days
Tinfoil survival blanket rustling all through the Himalayan night
 
I have made a deal with the universe that says, Please foil me over and over and over again until I turn to you with an open heart, no matter what is showing up. I call on the universe as Supreme Foil to all my nonsense. Foil me, my Love. Replace my obsessions with wonder and my fears with awe. Unwrap me and show me always the loose layers of You.
 
Sheets of smoked salmon pulling away from a bright foil base.
Onion skin curling under the knife.
Banana Tarte Tatin dropping to the plate from a hot dish.
I am being peeled.
 
Experience unwraps and glows with particularity, not-needing more, better, elsewise, less, or anything. The foil wrapper is infinitely expandable, infinitely shrinkable, fits any occasion, and goes with anything. Ta-daa! Foiled again by being unfoilable.
 
When we are drawn to one another, what in fact is happening? You are the perfect foil for this unexamined part of myself. I am living under a foil-me-forever dispensation, but I can’t assume the same about you. You might still just be looking for a good time, and that’s fine, except Miss Foiled Again here is unlikely to be the one to deliver it. I am an agent of the Great Foil, without trying to be. My allegiance is ultimately neither with your pleasure, nor with mine. What does that make me? A Christmas mouse with Nothing/Everything filling. A 3PM sunset. The North Sea at high tide with gulls flying in the dark. A sidewalk bin of made-in-China cashmeres, curled together like bats.
 
Foiled again
and again.
Pull the golden ends apart – bang!
A flat plastic car,
A flat plastic frog,
A tissue paper crown.
A love letter written on every puddle the world has ever lapped.

Would you like a sprig of mint on top of that existential dilemma? How about some parsley, fresh ground pepper, or grated Parmesan?
Yes to all of it.
Yes to extra cheese.
Yes to dressing the whole thing up with some festive zing.
 
At least sometimes.
In my backpack I carry two versions of lip goo: sprig of mint and plain. Sprig of mint has some mica in it, and a little pinkness that earns it the name Peony. I bought it at the grocery store after maybe a ten-year lip-color fast. The Peony leaf-buds had just started showing red above the mud-season ground, and I thought, Why not? So when my lips feel chapped – which in the winter is almost all the time – I have a choice. Sparkle, or non-sparkle? Right now, sparkle. Notebook Club could definitely handle either, but my sense was, Why not? I like the sprig-of-minty taste of it, and the way it sticks a little as my lips meet.
 
That’s the thing, isn’t it? I’m mostly happy with showing up feral, but I don’t have to, just like I don’t have to show up groomed. Last night in the sauna, I met a woman who started talking to me as soon as my feet were comfortably up the wall. She’s new to this remote place, a recently transplanted New Yorker who works from home. The gym is her one outlet for connecting with other humans, and thankfully, she says, the sprig of mint quotient here is very low. Her hair can be however it is; her swimsuit can be whatever it is; no one is going to worry about it. This is a sprig-optional community, we agreed. I notice this most in the contrast I experience when I travel back to Atlanta. There, so many women have their hair Done, their skin Done, their hairless bodies Done. For me these encounters feel like interactions with another, proximal species. I feel uncomfortable in the presence of so much sprigging, and I suspect they feel dismissive of so little.
 
Sprig of mint in my julep
Sprig of mint in the finger-washing bowl
Sprig of mint on the sorbet
 
Sprigging and sprogging,
Frigging and frogging.
Aho!
 
Last night I took a photograph that unnerved me. How it happened is: I saw a flash of the red comforter I have recently added on top of the large paisley one on my bed, to keep out the zero-degree nights. I went upstairs, found a place to rest the camera, set the timer, and let the body guide my gesture in the ten-second gap between button and shutter. I did this a few times and each instance elicited a slight variation on a back-turned, self-soothing curl. The one I gravitate towards has me in a sprigless crunch, hand at the back of my neck, hand on my shoulder, balled up below the large Five Elements thangka painting from Bhutan that I sleep beneath. In the moment the gesture felt comforting, and yet at a distance there is something braced, bracing, broken in it. Don’t hurt me. I’ve been hurt, and I am caring for that hurt. There is no sprig of mint in the wide world big enough to cover that truth. I feel you seeing me, and I will not meet your gaze.
 
The New York Times has been semi-regularly running reader response stories from men reflecting on MeToo. Some of it feels interesting to me. I don’t have other access to the dating traumas of eighty-year-old men, or the landscape of their sense of remorse. Other parts feel deeply frustrating and familiar. I’ve been a good man all my life and respected women. Don’t blame me for those scoundrels over there. Really? Are you ready to talk about how misogyny has benefited you, even if you (unlikely but possible) never actively participated in its rituals? Are you ready to call a sprig a sprig? Would you be willing to trade places with me, letting go of your privileges if you could? That’s a process I’m having to go through with respect to whiteness. When I was younger, my feeling was, I’m an immigrant. Whatever racist horrors you people have cooked up in your national past, they are nothing to do with me. Don’t talk to me about my sprigs. They’re mine, and no one else’s, and that’s that. I didn’t want to think about how the territory I occupied, even as an immigrant, was sponsored by systemic oppression. I didn’t want to be connected with Bad People, and I didn’t want to acknowledge the ways my ease came at the cost of others’ dis-ease.
 
A sprig in every pot. What would that look like? My favorite grocers – a small, scrappy, independent place – has just announced that they’re going to close. For me, that’s going to be deeply sad and hard, like losing a vegetable-church community. We can afford to get our sprigs elsewhere, if we have to, but I wonder about all the financially-struggling families I see there, all the East and South Asian restaurants that get their supplies there, all the new immigrants who depend on this place for vegetables and fruits that remind them of home. No one else is going to have fat sheaves of garlic chives for $1.75. No one else is going to stock fish sauce at wholesale prices. What will become of us without wide-leaf mint in plump bags, when we want it, at prices we can afford? In some ways, the store is sprigless – they don’t take produce out of the cardboard crates, they don’t take credit cards, and the only packaging they provide is the boxes that everything arrived in, to begin with. At the same time, it is the very Kingdom of Sprigs, stocking watercress, curry leaves, basil, cilantro, and rosemary – abundant, essential, and alive.
 
I wonder what it might take to save the store? The owners are physically exhausted from their work and ready to retire. But how about someone else? Money’s needed and also the physical strength and willingness to drive a truck through the night, load it up, unload it, and stock the shelves. That’s apparently a sixteen- to seventeen-hour day, and not everyone’s going to be willing to take up its call. I just wish the someones who would take joy and pride in it, who could make a living at it, would appear in this narrow window while there’s still a chance.
 
Sprig of mint to my nose on a hot and dusty day. Sprig of mint gifted to me by cooking friend that now occupies most of a garden bed. Sprig of mint growing spontaneously where the ground has been opened up for latent seeds and roots. Essential, strong, irrepressible. Mint will grow to meet the space offered it, sending out spreading, galloping rhizomes with little white centipede feet. It will come back once the winter ebbs, telling its stories of freshness distilled from frost-stilled mornings and soggy November afternoons. It will hold its essence, sprigged, chopped, muddled, or infused.

Fairy dust. Dust bunnies. Dusty old tales of yore.
Dusty is the household life, a rubbish heap.
Washing the dust from His feet.
Washing the dust from Her eyes.
Angel dust.
How long it will take for this body to turn to dust?
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Taking handfuls of that young man’s ashes and throwing them into the brisk English air.
All we are is dust in the wind.
Snot, oil of the joints, undigested food, oil of the body, hair of the head, hair of the body, teeth, nails, skin, marrow, stardust, stardust, stardust.
 
Anything I pick up in my studio tells me dust-stories about just how long it’s been since I last picked it up. Two weeks? A modest sprinkling. Two years? Elaborate dust-spires have formed, and the object is transitioning to a kind of dustful rest. I can sweep it off, but the truth is there: From dust you have arisen {paint-rag} and to dust you shall return.
 
In the monastery, there was a formal way to request that whoever was assigned to give that evening’s Dharma talk surrender the goods:
 
Brahmā cā loka tipati sahampati,
Kat añjalī andivaraṁ ayājathā,
Santīdha sattapara jakkha jātikā,
Desatu dhammaṁ anukampimaṁ pajaṁ
 
In English this is roughly, From the realm of the gods came the world-ruler Sahampati, requesting with joined palms that the Buddha teach the Dharma to those with but little dust in their eyes. No dust? Not a chance. But some beings, the request suggests, have not gone too long without shaking themselves of the terrible ideas that afflict most of us, most of the time.
 
For me it varies day by day, how much dust I think I have in my eyes, how much is actually there. This morning I woke lazily, but cheerfully, ready to meet experience without ill will. OK, stove, let’s do this thing. OK, bread, I think there’s time. OK, dogs, let’s go skid around on some crusty snow. OK, book, I’m getting closer to having you figured out. Who knows, really, but the feeling is of less dust. Not because there’s no pain and everything is solved, but because there’s less resistance to what's there. More love for What Is means less dust? That seems plausible.
 
Nadia Bolz-Weber, sort of a rock star in the Lutheran world, talks about the distance we tend to imagine between ourselves as we are, and ourselves as we should be: Dusty Mofo Me, and Dustless Me of the Future. She makes the obvious but elusive point that What Is is always in relationship with what we actually are. Of course. It’s not called What Is for nothing. But meanwhile, if we distract ourselves in relationship with what should be, we miss the opportunity to be loved. We fret about dust and forget innate wholeness. The way she describes all of this is moving and self-evident. Don’t imagine that God is waiting to love someone who will never exist. Don’t allow dust to disconnect you from the deep sources of your worth.
 
When I was a student, the sculpture building at Yale was far removed from campus, a vaguely alarming post-industrial warren of dangerous equipment opening into cavernous spaces. My TA, let’s call him Matt, was a deeply devoted resident of this building. One day I came in for Sculpture I (a kind of study-abroad for painters like me), and someone had block-lettered MATT IS A DUSTY MOFO across the back wall of the studio, in what looked like drywall compound. It struck me with the force of love. Someone sculpture-loved Matt, just as he was. It’s stuck with me, and sometimes a voice that sounds a bit like JULIE IS A DUSTY MOFO rises up grinning from the ground of being to fill me with delight.
 
Dust is funny: it can mean neglect and also acceptance. I reach behind the seat of our small red car and grasp a ball of dusty dog hair, dried leaves, and pine needles. Neglect plus acceptance. How likely is it, given fifteen free minutes, that I’ll deal with this, instead of making myself a cup of tea and reading something random online? Not very likely, until it is. I now know there’s a gas station nearby with free air and free vacuum. Someday, everything will come together, and that dust-wad will get sucked into wherever gas station detritus goes. Meanwhile, I’m not too worried.
 
Holy, dusty places. Dusty, holy places. Some of my first exposure to both happened in central Tibet. There’s very little water, lots of places, and it’s cold, so laundry’s just not something people do a lot of. The wind whips mountain dust into tall, whirling devils, and all the colors outdoors are mediated by a fine coating of the world’s disintegration. Holy, dusty world. I remember going around with the bandanna tied over my nose, Annie Oakley style. I remember dust in my ears, in my eyes, my nose. The Himalayas thrust upward each year, while the winds sand them down to dust.
 
Sometimes I can feel parts of myself being ground down and polished by those same winds. My ambitions and resentments soften; my mistakes feel less grave. This morning I accidentally squirted out way more of my expensive face cream from the tube than I needed, and the first thought to arise was, Let us celebrate the festival of roses! I smeared the fine-smelling stuff into my face, neck, chest, and hands. Life is too short to get testy about flailings like these. So what if the sheets are a bit dog-dusty? We all slept so sweetly last night, and this morning the sun has a better chance than usual of piercing through December gloom.
 
I’m on the last page of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart Sexy Jesus Calendar that my nun friends gave me last year for Christmas. Instead of ordering another one, I think I’m going to collage my own this year, pasting the radiant heart of Jesus over sandhill cranes, polar bears, and urban parks. I’m going to put the Sexy Jesus back into nonprofit environmental conservation and birdwatching, as my reminder that all that is dusty is not lost, and all that is lost is not dusty. He will smile at me for another year, dustless, stainless, smiling, and secure. I’ll smile back, remembering JESUS IS A DUSTY MOFO who loves me just as I am.