This is the scene: We have moved into an apartment in Manhattan. A nice old place over busy restaurants on a tree lined street in Greenwich. We are amongst artists and breathers. The young overpriced New Yorker's life filled with social expectations and an expensive ending. But I can not touch what I’m looking at. It is asleep waiting to be discovered. I have finished painting the kitchen walls and my mind. We have put all our things away as if we are to stay. We are settled but not yet settling. We are present but unwritten. I am watching as it all comes to life.

This is the view from the window: A ferocious wind tears a fistful of dead leaves from the trees across the street. I watch as the branches are stripped. It seems quick and painless. The leaves are off like children to the playground. They spray up into the air above two pedestrians who are working to stay grounded. Small brown leaves are whipped at the window, running like they want to get in. The trees are bare and gutted, ready for winter. The leaves are endless, blown in circles by wind in a cannel between two apartment buildings and my mind.

Outside when I hit the road the first snows of winter have fallen. The morning is filled with a crisp cold that awakens something inside on my way to work. I am not on vacation or sightseeing the world. I am not gazing into other peoples' lives. I am not a writer searching for a muse. I am not a tourist in a big city. I am walking familiar steps, doing the necessary. My head is down. My head is up. The wind is slamming into my face. I am an inhabitant walking to work shaping a life like moist clay. I am an office worker in a tall building, a college graduate waiting to make it big. I am a lost writer in a chaotic world of enterprises and giant corporations. I could not stay a nomad forever. I had to find a place to build up from. And I am not in control. I am equipped with untamed hands. I do not maneuver in perfected motions but draw the walls up as close to perfection as I can. This form is natural, not complete, un-unique.

I can compare it to the wild control of a throwing wheel. I can see it as a spinning disk of wet clay on a steady axis. Splatters have left marks sprayed across the universe. A large clump lies in the center, eventually to be molded by cupped hands. It isn't too romantic I hope, these ideas of snow and warmth and clay, everything spinning sloppily together on a clean surface? It will be removed when it’s done, cut with a sharp wire, detached from the throwing wheel. It will be put on a shelf to dry. Bone-Dry. Closer to withstanding time and destruction.