October 12th, 2026 - A Very Safe Place
Dear TNY,
“A Very Safe Place” is a very boring story.
This morning I was texting with a friend about writing. About how I didn’t know what I was going to write today. I told her about my thesis defense (colloquium) and how a major thrust of mine, after breaking down what makes literature transcendent vs not, was to forget everything I just taught you (how to manufacture transcendence) because authenticity matters and if you are following a formula, then the authenticity disappears like a fart in the wind, and the art is just ego. That, conversely, the story itself will tell you where it has been, where it is now, and where it wants to go. That only by letting go of your ego (can’t all the way let go, chaps and chappettes, because art itself requires some ego just to produce; one must say, “I have something to say,” even if one is convinced, like myself, that one is channeling something bigger and from far away; that if the artist is truly “in it”, he or she is just an antenna and a stenographer) can you hope to get the fuck out of the way and let through what wants to come through. That in order to attempt transcendence, both for the self and for the other, you have to let go of you.
Right?
And that makes sense because how feeble and small one individual is. One individual contains nothing compared to the waters of the creator, whomever that may be. I often think of it like the monk in season 3 of The White Lotus. Below is a (hand-typed!) transcript of the scene:
Monk: You have questions for me?
Timothy Ratliff: Well, my daughter wants to join your…whatever this is. And, uh…
Monk: And you want to understand why?
Timothy Ratliff: Yeah.
Monk: Many young people come here from your country. I think because maybe spiritual malaise. Lost connection with nature, with the family, lost connection with the spirit. What is left? The self. Identity. Chasing money, pleasure, yeah? Everyone run from pain towards the pleasure. But when they get there, only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.
Timothy Ratliff: Yeah. Okay. Thanks.
(beat)
Timothy Ratliff: Can I ask you one more question? What…what do you think happens when we die?
Monk: When we die? Great question! When you are born, you are like a single drop of water flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older. You descend back down. You die. You land back into the water. Become one with the ocean again. No more separated. No more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return. Like coming home.
Timothy Ratliff: Thank you.
And so, how can I expect to write something truly profound if I am the source? The source is obviously the water, for profundity anyway, and my job is to get out of the way.
The problem with this story, and over 90% of the stories you publish, TNY, is that the author doesn’t get out of the way. And you don’t have the taste or self-criticality to correct that. It took me a long time to realize that I have the same right you do to proclaim that I know what’s good writing and what isn’t. Everyone does. You aren’t an authority any more than me or my crazy Uncle John or my deceased father or The Wizard of Kindness or anyone else. The Truth requires no expertise or payment for admission or understanding. There is no elitism when it comes to Capital A Art, only the industry around it. And that is where you derive your perceived superiority from. Think about that. Advanced Publications, a for profit entity, owns Condé Nast which owns your ass, and you get paid to do a thing, paid to show up, paid for your opinion, paid to live “a life of words.” What luck you have! They have deemed you valuable enough to pay you for a job that any English speaking human can do (really it’s any human but you publish in English in America, so there would have to be some changes made to get anyone). Why can anyone do your job? Because it’s subjective. Art is subjective. So they didn’t hire you for your taste, as they could have fucking hired anyone, they hired you for your willingness to generate income by providing advertising to the literary industry with your pages. They hired you because you convinced them that you were important. And you thought you were important for the same reason they hired you: Because neither of you, ALL of you, aren’t willing to admit you don’t know shit. You’re clinging to self instead of letting the work, the transcendence, be the guide. And it shows.
The ending of this story was fucking telegraphed the whole way through. Why? Because the author knew what it was going to be ahead of time. They just made this 7,600-word bullshit up, sat back, smiled, and said, “There, I did it.” Yes, you did. In the same way that every other human on this planet shit their pants for the first years of your life. You did it. You produced, in your tiny, separate drop, just enough juice to squeeze out a story that is absolute drudgery and is a reflection of what you think your potential is. It is limited to self. But to you, looking inside your own drop, that’s all there is. The drop looks so big and beautiful to you that you never think to look outside of what your drop can do. I mean, look at this “wonderful” story. It was so good I skimmed the middle third. You couldn’t even convince a person who reads every story you publish to read the whole thing. A person who craves to read, you couldn’t make me do it. Because you forgot to think about me and everyone else but yourself.
And because the whole thing was telegraphed, there was no surprise, you know? Because the author knew where it was going, they were never going to be surprised so they could not surprise me or any other reader.
And that’s a level of immaturity that has become the new norm. I see it and hear it all the time. Ask someone what they want in a partner, what they think their perfect job would be, their perfect place to live, their perfect fucking life. And they have that shit on lock. They’ll rattle off all the particulars, down to the length of pubic hair on their partner. They, too, limit their story to their tiny little drop.
I got asked a few years ago to write what I wanted in a partner (also, why would one ask me, man; to steal a line from Chef, I buy ink by the barrel, baby!). I got asked this by my partner at the time (not really; see, she broke up with me but then continued to talk to me daily, ask questions about me fixing her house, how to divest herself of her car, how to navigate the passing of her pet (R.I.P. Super Chief, I miss the macaroni noodles, bud; you crotchety, old knocking-down-everything-and-then-looking-in-the-mirror bitch; you were a fucking original)), etc. We were both supposed to think about what we wanted in a partner and then reconvene to discuss. She wrote a list. I wrote a five page manifesto against lists.
And my argument was the same as I would use for literature. Or life. Why would I limit myself to the paltry offerings that my imagination can conjure? I am but a drop. I want to know what the ocean has in store for me. What does it know? Where’s it been, where is it now, and where is it going? And as a writer, rather, as an antenna and a stenographer, I know that what comes out of whatever the fuck is behind the curtain is far more gentle, loving, dark, furious, sultry, sassy, and kind that anything I can come up with. An all-knowing thing knows more than I do. It’s in the fucking name. So why would I think I could put myself above it and know more about what would be better for me than it would know?
I can’t. I will always be limited by the size of my drop with regard to what I need in a partner, what I need in a life, and what I need from literature. Except to say this: What I need from anything and everything is beyond my knowing.
This is not a new idea. Alan Watts, among many, has covered this. I like his interpretation quite a lot as I see that he also knew, even when writing it, that it was beyond him…that the thing worth knowing was beyond him. Here is The Dream of Life.
If you awaken from this illusion and you understand that black implies white, self implies other, life implies death (or shall I say death implies life?), you can feel yourself – not as a stranger in the world, not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke - but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
I am not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it, I want you to play with it. I want you to think of its possibilities, I am not trying to prove it. I am just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about. So then, let’s suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time, or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each you would say “Well that was pretty great. But now let’s have a surprise, let’s have a dream which isn’t under control, where something is gonna happen to me that I don’t know what it's gonna be."
And you would dig that and would come out of that and you would say “Wow that was a close shave, wasn’t it?” Then you would get more and more adventurous and you would make further- and further-out gambles what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have. Of playing that you weren't God, because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he is not. So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality, not God in a politically kingly sense, but god in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you are all that, only you are pretending you are not.
It’s taken me a long time to understand this. I’m certain that I don’t get all of it even now, you know? Because it’s so much bigger than me and my drop. My understanding. Than all life. It’s everything. It isn’t this stupid story or even this stupid letter, you know? It is the crackle behind all of this. Every birthday party you attended, every kiss you experienced, every break up, every loss, every bag of Fritos, every toenail clipped, every speeding ticket, every breath you took, every lover you touched, every hair you grew, fuck, every tree, every blade of grass, every cup of water and every brook, every page of every book ever written and published and every bit of glue used in the binding and every seashell and every horse’s tongue and every bacteria in every gut and every speck of stardust and every single time you loved…all love. All of it. All of this is you. All of this is me. All of this is also for you. And for me. And for everyone. And it’s free. And it doesn’t ask anything of you. It will always all be there for you and for everyone else, and everything else, whether you are selfish or selfless, whether you get killed or kill, whether you give or take. But, when faced with the incredibility of it, the sheer size of everything, how can one not have gratitude for this time as a drop? How can one not be humble? How can one not try to exert one’s force as a tsunami of grace? And to fail at that? God have I failed spectacularly at that. What a gift this is, the chance to be a singularity. A chance to struggle. To convince oneself that one has an identity. That one is special. That one has something to say. That one matters. When, in fact, one does not matter so much as one’s allness matters. That we are part of something bigger than our feeble, 4th dimensional minds can handle.
It’s a lot to take in, you know? And it should never really be taken in, nor can it. Because it’s bigger and more lovely than you can imagine. So. Stop. Trying. Let it flow through you, you know?
It is not within us to know. The knowing must be reckoned with. It must be unlearned. It must be unknown.
So, I don’t want to know what happens next, in this story or in my life. It will be bad, I know that. I have more bad coming. More loss. More heartbreak. More thinking that the ether delivered what I thought was always supposed to happen just to have it kick me in the fucking teeth and leave (which was, it turns out, what was supposed to happen and what was needed). More darkness is headed my way.
But yesterday, I went for a walk in the brisk wind of a Northeast Fall, the leaves an array of colors which cannot be photographed appropriately to contain their loveliness, and I took a ride up the ski lift to the North Peak, where I continued my walk, choosing to hike the ridge to Barker Summit, and somewhere in between, after a group of four passed me, 2x men and wives, in their 50’s and dressed from the pages of an REI catalog, I happened upon a ruffed grouse in the yellow, fallen leaves at the edge of the dirt track I was on. He was about 20’ away and he didn’t spook when I took a step closer. I was gentle. Slow. I knelt down and eventually sat. He slowly came over to me, cooing the whole time, looking at me the whole time. I hummed back, high and low tones, and then he would coo. It went on this way for 15 mins, him circling closer and closer. Me waiting to see how close he would come. He got within a foot. We talked and talked. An excavator came by and it was the biggest, most unnatural and clanging sound I could imagine. My bird buddy took to the trees and disappeared. But I stayed seated, just in case. Lo, did the mighty bird emerge from the forest to come near again, cooing and cooing. I offered him what food I had. He didn’t take any, choosing to grab a leaf here or there from the debris on the ground. I tried offering him a leaf, the same as the ones he was eating. He declined. After a time, I knew I needed to get back before dark. So I bid him adieu and began walking down the road. This motherfucker followed like a dog would, except it came in fits and starts. I got maybe 50’ forward of him and needed to pee so I did. And he came sprinting up, right next to me. So again I sat down. And this time I leaned in with my face. I got my face within 6” of his. I could see my whole body in the reflection of his eye, which blinked as he cooed. I watched the scant wind ruffle the outermost of his fluff as his throat swelled from the sound he was making. I realized this was the closest I had ever been to a wild bird that was alive. I opened my eyes the whole way, whites all the way around the irises, guys, and really leaned in. And I saw it.
I saw the bird. Sure. But I also saw Ben first, as this correspondence from the beyond was delivered by a bird; god do I miss Ben. I saw my kids, from when they slipped through a slit in their mother’s abdomen, squeezed out like the effluent of a an angry zit, them, grumpy old men, skinny and shaky and blue, with swollen red testicles, and scratches on their face, having already started their lives of self-torture, like us all, before they became singular, in those hazy months of first growth, in the duality, all the way through ‘til today, both wildly different people but the best people I have ever met in my whole, beautiful life. I saw the fall colors and I saw the idea of fall at all, that it didn’t have to be as it is because it could have been anything but it’s there all the same, indifferent to you or I, as it has been falling since trees and plants figured out how to use chlorophyll to harvest sustenance from Sol, and will continue to fall long after humans are gone to bear witness. I saw my family and friends. I saw you, lover. I saw every caramel-colored hair on your head, silver streaks intermixed, I saw your bunions and your cracked heels, I saw the dimples on your lower back and the mud under your toenails, I saw the freckles on your shoulders and the way age is just begging to show in the lines on your slender neck, I saw you kick your short legs and arms with excitement, and the way your skin grows gooseflesh when I whisper dumb shit in your ear. I saw my mother and the way she used to swim with me, before I could swim, my arms wrapped around her neck, her diving under the water and my little toddler legs floating upward behind her as she dove deep down and I refused to let go. I saw my father and his Stonehenge teeth, before the dentures, and his gigantic laugh and the way he danced, spastic and unhinged, because this motherfucker did not care about what people thought. I saw my brother, underwater, in the Animas behind our house, the green of the water brighter on the bottom than the surface, his long, thick hair swirling in invisible eddies. I saw my ex-wife’s smile, back when we were young, when she taught me that people make noise when they kiss and she taught me about whispering in ears. I saw S., The Angel of Portland, smoking a cigarette in the hot tub and laughing with her head all the way back and I saw her, in the dark, crying, trying to put the metaphoric bag back over her face, both proud and scared of the fact that she took it off at all.
I saw all of this was me. And I saw it was you, too. All of this was me & you. And it was everything else as well. For the tiniest second, I left the chat as a drop, and I got to see the ocean.
For this, I have much gratitude. Most recently, I have gratitude for all of the darkness I have been navigating for the past couple of years. Had I not had such vibrant darkness, I likely would have walked by the bird. Would not have been in Maine at all, at Sunday River, on this Saturday, October 3rd, 2026, in the year of our Lord, which is me and you and everyone else we know and don’t know and that has lived and that will ever live…I may not have had the wherewithal to do any of the things I did yesterday without the perspective of darkness.
And so, thank you. Thank you ruffed grouse. Thank you darkness. Thank you, TNY, for this story. Thank you for trying. Trying is failing. And as long as you keep failing, you’ll eventually find something worth doing. Something worth publishing. Something worth living for. Something worth…everything.
But if you have been paying attention at all, you’ll know that it’s all worth everything. All of it is everything. And that it’s just waiting for you in the yellowing leaves on the edge of a dirt road on a sunny afternoon to stop, sit down, and play with it.
Nick
P.S. All of this was written while listening to Max Richter’s Spring. If you haven’t yet, do. Do it today. Let go, today. Be you, today. Tell someone you love them, today. Cry, today. Fuck am I a gigantic baby these days. I have so much love in my heart. It is staggering. Gotta remember to stop holding it all in; gotta remember, daily, to let it flow through me. To be a stenographer of the heart. In fact, on that note, let it flow through you, today, as well.
