I’m glad somebody called me out on that. I preferred the sensation of that line to the ambiguity of what it refers to, so I left it.

I don’t know from where. The womb, I guess. It came from an Annie Dillard line that I can’t shake from my head:

“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”

Being “set down”, for me, isn’t about wherever we came from (the womb satisfies my interest in that question), but the notion that we’re born into an already-going, well underway world. We’re set down into something that already exists, and I find that confrontation between a nascent, naive subjectivity and an established, buzzing world astonishing, in an oddly refreshing way.

Would love to hear what you’d respond to “from where exactly?”