I don’t need a tape deck to have one line immediately come back to me in Watts’s raspy, mischievous voice, as I remember it: ‘We are not things that behave, but processes that proceed.’ ... Watts’s phrasing offered me something radical in its simplicity: the possibility that I wasn’t a solid, separate ‘thing’ at all, but an unfolding, a movement. A

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We describe people, and therefore think of people, as nouns. ‘Grandma’ is a kind of thing. There is Grandma in her chair, and then she dies. Where did she go? Our premise of object constancy demands we place her somewhere. Heaven, hell, the void.

But Grandma was never a thing. She was a verb the entire time. A miraculous harmony of processes –

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There it is: my crow, it seems to me, has been here since the beginning of all things, is still here and always will be. He isn’t just in the world; he is of it. I am only a visitor, a stranger in a strange land, a temporary interloper standing briefly between infinitudes of non-existence. The crow will live forever and I will die, and I know it.

Bu

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