auftauchen

+ return to the depths

Ages ago, embedded in a tiny town in Saxony, Germany, formerly behind the iron curtain, I absorbed as much German as I could from my peers.

Phrases washed over me in waves; chunks of language stuck to my teeth; my proper ‘high German’ accent from high school morphed into a thick “Sächsisch” drawl. I sunk deep into the local environment.

A poetic frenzy attends anyone paying close attention to foreign figures of speech. What you take for granted in your own linguistic world gets thrown into new light when you cross the language barrier.

auftauchen

to emerge

to surface

to appear

to come up

~

it was at a party.

Someone “surfaced.” (showed up) …aufgetaucht…

My jaw dropped. Of course, sure, we can surface at gatherings, but i’d never thought about it in quite this way before.

Hearing that word in this context remains a potent thought crystal, an unshakable image of surfacing, as though we are all inside our own depths until we reveal ourselves to each other in moments, only to dive back in to an indeterminate state of thought saturation and or some private world, not so much a receding into the background as a total dissolution into one’s own Mariana trench of daily life.

Some people see you more than others, so you might be trenchmates. but for the ones you only see at the party, it’s a surfacing, an arising, only to vanish once more, when the social conditions shift, when it’s time to go.

~

surfaces.

At the fixed star camp at CAELi last week, Camm led the group through six exercises in sacred geometry, allowing surfaces of polygons to appear: tetrahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and so on.

i went on a shading rampage.

it felt great to have graphite in my hands again and simmer in that pregnant silence of many minds engaged in art simultaneously.

Molly played sound bowls as our pencils flew across the page and transported us into flourishing morphic fields as the surfaces of the shapes…tauchten auf…

emerged.

~

present tense, past tense, noun form, future tense. Surfac/-e/-ing

What’s surfacing for you?

Or have you returned to the depths already?

~

See you again on Saturday, August 2, 2025 at 6:36 pm PDT, when we get a brittle wake-up call.

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Photo by Chris Turgeon on Unsplash.