The word “gunstock” sends the listener into a maze of potential sensory paths, evoking as it does everything from the anticipation of a fast run down a New Hampshire mountain with powder surging around the tips of your skis to the feel of oiled walnut against your shoulder, and there’s anticipation there too — the sound coming a split second late, the long whoosh of the bullet drawn out into the air at supersonic speeds just ahead of the blow to your shoulder.

You will not know much of the reality of either of these things until they have happened to you, so if you have not skied or shot, the word “gunstock” is a theory at best. It is a gate that may lead you to contradictory places, or at least to places that bear little resemblance to each other until you decide to cut through the walls of the maze and see that in truth, “gunstock” means “rapid movement” with a related meaning of “potential death.”

That “joy” is also operative in each of those meanings may not be apparent until you cut through the green walls that define the maze established by the presence of the word.

Learning which of the meanings is operative changes the nature of the maze.

Holding all of the meanings to be true in all situations is key to cutting away all mazes.

Coming at last to the river he’d written about so often but had never seen, he dips his hand and feels the flow — a strong, velvety tug. If he were to fall in he’d be carried along before he could learn to control it, struggling at first but soon enough relaxing toward an inevitable collapse of his will to survive…

How bad could that be? He’d just placed everything he had carried here onto the bank, after all, where someone could find it if they came looking, and he had made it all specifically to be used — that he may not ever have been the one destined to use them did not mean they were not useful. They would be found eventually. They might lead someone to look for him, or they might not…perhaps they would simply walk off with his things…

Rather than be forever jealous of the use his work might be to another beside himself, he steps in and falls immediately onto his back, is swept along, and noticing a dark rise in the water up ahead, perhaps a hidden rock, he steers toward it as best he can, praying that if he lodges against it it may be enough to hold him back from the roar of the falls ahead, though it may not be, and if no one is watching, if he misses the last chance to catch it and goes on down the stream, all this will be unknown forever, someone will find the things he left behind him and go their own way with them while this worry, this exhilaration, the choice itself, will remain unknown…

the dark rise in the water…

the way it feels, felt, has felt, is feeling…