The simplicity of being animal; the complexity of being human.

It was the coyotes’ third round of howling in the dark night, each and every time my awareness of them growing more acute. Sleep no longer an option, I do the worst and retrieve my phone from the other room. The window open, the air frigid, I cocoon in the heavy blankets and read that their actual location would be hard to place, so adept are these tricksters at throwing their voices.

A few mornings beforehand I was again, up. This time the hour was approaching five and though barefoot and though cold outside the stars seemed to be saying there was no time to find shoes. I stood in the backyard and looked up. My ears caught the canids again, their joyous yips, howls, and barks backdropped by the ever present flow of the river on a windless night.

Then, my eyes caught a phenomenon – a series of bright lights following each other, equally spaced, in perfect rhythm and time across the vast night sky. I watched this caravan travel the span of my view and I marveled at it. It wasn’t extraterrestrial, of course, but satellites are something I always forget are our reality.

I find myself on reddit.com/r/itsalwaysstarlink where I indeed learn that these beings are Starlink satellites in their orbit. Periodically, the satellites will fall into a syncopated rhythm and fly together as if on a train for mere moments. Catching it, then, is unpredictable, though increasingly common with the number that are occupying the cosmos.

My son becomes obsessed with Mars, with space travel, with the universe, and I am not one to dissuade. We read about Curiosity and evaluate the photos being sent back. We bookmark the launch schedule and check in with whoisinspace.com. We build from Legos shuttles and nosecaps and planets and launch pads and rovers and drones. We stumble upon a video of SpaceX accomplishing an incredible feat – catching the booster in “chopstick” arms back on earth after it breaks away from the spacecraft that hurtles further and further beyond the atmosphere.

“Mom! Be the chopsticks!” he’ll shout as he comes running down the hallway. “Can we watch it again?” and we do, both of us emotional at the shot of the team back in California cheering in disbelief at their success.

The season is done, finished. Every March I think it will be the year I turn into a Horticulturalist and every October I find no other label for myself but Amateur. I grew food, yes, and it was wonderful, yes, but the dream of extending a bounty of vegetables to my immediate neighbors and those beyond has not come to pass. Unbelievably, I continue.

We harvest a crop of ornamental white pumpkins and line them up. “Mom,” says Wilder, “Let’s give one to each of our neighbors,” and we empty his handlebar bag of twigs and rocks and a clay gnome and a chain and fill it with four small pumpkins and he rides his bike through the small village and hands three over directly to the elders that comprise our town and places one on the porch when we see her car missing.

On the way back to our home we cut through the back yards a different way and discover an elbow of creek and a foot bridge we have not seen before and we’re both dumbfounded. I have lived here, after all, in this town of 16 people in less than a square mile for over five years and he has lived here his entire life and yet however overgrown the path neither of us have ever seen this elbow or walked this bridge. “I’ll clean the leaves off before bringing my bike over,” he says, and does so solemnly as I sit creekside in wonder.

I’ve been thinking of samsaras, the ingrained patterns and habits we all hold. I hear a commonly held trope on a podcast: “90% of our daily thoughts are redundant.” This seems hard to measure but also true, as I move through my day. The story I’ve told myself is written before the sun peeks over the hills. I write lines down in my phone and think I’ll get to them later in the day. I’ll set aside a few hours on Tuesday, I think, I should have almost all of Saturday, my calendar tells me. But days and weeks and months pass and my son is approaching four and I question if I’ve been present enough. I question what I shoveled into my mouth and what I let my eyes rest on and I give space to what I’ve already conscientiously rejected. How? Why?

Yesterday at Tippet Rise Claire Chase performed a work in progress. It was two summers ago that for twenty minutes she played a variety of wind instruments both ancient and modern under the shadow of Trilogy and I found her ability so out of bounds and liberating that honestly I have her name on a stickie on a wall not to forget, and yesterday was no different. She describes Density 2036: Each year she works to push her understanding of the flute she commands; each year she writes or collaborates with another composer to work against any limitations she’s fallen into; each year must be different than the one before. Today, she says, is year 12 of 24 in the commitment.

Last month I was a guest on an arts and culture podcast of Yellowstone Public Radio. “Tell us a bit about your background,” the host asked.

“I am Portuguese. That’s integral to who I am,” I began. “I grew up in Portugal and that impacted the way I look at life. I was also homeschooled my entire life, and that has equally defined me.”

Hours later on the drive home from Billings, I chide myself. What kind of answer was that?, knowing they were looking for some sort of reason for why I was now doing what I was doing. But that is the reason.

I visit my parents. My dad and I go to breakfast, a familiar diner, and I stumble over words.

“It sounds to me like you’re describing contentment,” he says. “Something antithetical to western culture. What does it mean to be satisfied with what you have? Not seeking more?”

I find peace and understanding in this moment, and I appreciate my dad. I don’t want another child, is what I am trying to say, and that’s ok, is what he says again and again.

Language is the only homeland, writes Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz. He speaks, of course, of displacement, of immigration, of loss of culture and ways of life. But what if our bodies have never known the homeland? What if the language for what’s within translates to no other?

However redundant, I hold feelings from nine months, two years, seven years, ten, twenty, thirty years ago within. I feel the reverberations of the memories, of the time, of the words that defined flowing through the well grooved paths of my mind. It’s cold enough now to have a fire in the morning. I salt the bread rising, and wait for the sun over the hills. Will the coyotes come, or will I conjure them?