Tricycle | Awake in the World

Orangutans are largely solitary creatures, and because the ingredients of their preferred diet are widely dispersed, they've developed ways to avoid having to rummage through the canopy all day, expending precious energy in a restless search for food. One of these strategies entails little more than sitting quietly on a high branch and peering off into the dense green air until the desired delicacy announces itself to their gaze. Primatologists who study the apes have called this behavior "the fruit stare."

I've been doing it a lot myself lately. Midway through last summer, I stepped into the in-between of in-betweenjobs. I'd visited this particular bardo before and had always returned, at the end of my transit, to a mundane realm inhabited by an alarming number of both hungry ghosts and jealous gods: the world of New York journalism. Now I was hoping that time in the in-between might lead me somewhere else.