I diagramed my life the other night: a small, two-dimensional square.

Several years ago, I collaborated with my friend Lyn on a recording of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.” She read/interpreted the poem over my original piano accompaniment.

Always, after I’ve come full circle, the final stanza reverberates still:

The world stands out on either side
No wider than the heart is wide;
Above the world is stretched the sky,—
No higher than the soul is high.
The heart can push the sea and land
Farther away on either hand;
The soul can split the sky in two,
And let the face of God shine through.
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat—the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.

For the past week, I’ve been officially mesmerized by Lhasa de Sela’s The Living Road; the last track particularly speaks to me:

Soon this space will be too small
And I will go outside
To the huge hillside
Where the wild winds blow
And the cold stars shine
I will put my foot on the living road
And be carried from here to the heart of the world
And I’ll say the three words that will save us all
And I’ll say the three words that will save us all
My veins and bones will be burned to dust
You can throw me into a black iron pot
And my dust will tell
What my flesh would not

When I hear her voice, I retrace my steps across Montreal, knowing that that is where she lives, steps I took so many springs ago to visit a friend, Salam from Lebanon—whose name means “peace.”

When I hear her words, I’m standing atop Thursday Hill in Lublin looking out across the horizon. There, the neo-Gothic castle; there, the death camp Majdanek; there, the chapel with the ancient frescoes; there the bus station and Gypsy market. And here, my feet planted firmly on terra nova.

When she sings about the cold stars, I’m standing on the roof of my apartment complex in Shimonoseki watching the constellations unfold across the spring sky with the scent of cherry blossoms hanging in the humid air.

And yet I’m still here. Tutaj. Aquí. Здесь. Тут. For a minimum of three more years I’ll be here, blooming where I’m planted—thanks, sister, for that constant reminder and implication! (Now if only I could get my exes to stop sending me emails desperately asking, “Are you in Dallas still? Where are you?” constantly reminding me of my other lives so many miles from here….)

The trick, no? is to find Salam (that inner peace) where I am (not in Montreal) after taking up the journey on the Living Road. And yet in my Latin lesson this morning, I read Seneca’s “Vita est iter”: life is a journey. And the more I stay here, the closer east gets to west. And it takes more than three words to save us all.

I can’t even find Salam these days, even on google.com; and we’re no longer friends. My friendship with his analogue Jihad from Damascus (though possibly living in Toronto these days) is more than over as well. I think I need some strong Turkish coffee—if only I could remember Salam’s recipe—and a puff or two from the opium pipe to get me out of my own head. To get me away from here. If only for an hour.