I recently decided to stay in New York City for one more year. Lots about the city is fascinating and wonderful, obviously, or I wouldn't stay -- but I am left feeling uneasy about certain things, and thinking about parts of my home state of Maine.

For all that is fascinating and enjoyable about this city, there is also something dark and draining. I still haven't figured out if this is simply a matter of perception -- not in the sense that it doesn't exist, but in the sense that if I learned to squeeze my eyes such so, I wouldn't see it, or that if looked in the other direction, it would fade.

I'm not really sure how to explain it. I've talked to others who feel the same way, and it's as if each of us is able to articulate an aspect of the whole. One friend described the feeling of constantly missing out, of not being with the right people, of feeling a steady pressure, carried in the air itself, of needing to do more, be more, buy more, more more more all the time. Another friend echoed this tonight; he talked about seeing those people who are always a bit more beautiful than you -- the gym-designer-mirror crew, who of course in this city are often culture and knowledge workers -- the publishing and music and entertainment world crew. The people who make the Village and lower sides so oily sometimes, a theme park of counterculture affluence, armfuls of tattoos and skater punk uniforms and headed out of Bally's in search of a massage. The people who get rich young and marry someone on a billboard.

There's an element of distaste slipping into my words, and I'm not entirely comfortable with that. To each his, or her, own, after all; and if nobody is hurt against their will what is the harm? And so I should be reminded. But this is, at any rate, a facet of city culture I try to keep out of my own mental atmosphere. There are others -- the sheer number of people, the lack of solitude, the pain and frustration. Of course, the inverse of these are much of why I stay -- special people, unexpected moments of silence, the moments of everyday humor and grace. But I find myself slowly accreting a certain psychic shell to deal with it. Shell is probably the wrong word; I don't move through my days behind a mental wall, I haven't lost my feelings. But something is missing here, there is a void, some basic substance that ought to exist naturally between people and doesn't . . . a lack of time, space, maybe even love . . . and to avoid being sucked into the vacuum, you hold on to your own anchors. This sounds far more dramatic and conscious than it is. As with anywhere, you just live your life and enjoy your friends and try to live well. But doing that takes more energy here, I think, in many other places, such as Maine.

My friend tonight, drinking beers and watching the walkers on DeKalb, the kids in the park across the street, absorbing the pleasant hum of life, called it down-to-earthness: tolerance, generosity, independence, resourcefulness and humor, mixed together in all the different shapes of potatoes, gourds, vegetables that when farmed with freedom rather than industrialism are so extraordinarily various . . . sometimes people ask if, growing up in a small place, I found the range of people, and their frame of mind, narrow. Quite the opposite: Bangor, Maine, and the communties in the north that I've visited, were strongly tolerant, even encouraging, of idiosyncracy and individuality. Far more so than, say, the suburbs I've seen. Not that tolerance or intolerance are overt -- they are like soil, growing conditions, parameters that are unnoticed but real.

Maybe this is a residue -- or a surviving strain -- of the frontier mentality. People who rely on their neighbors to survive, who tell stories at night, are people who in the end don't need to care what you do in your bedroom, or where you are from or what you believe or what you look like, so long as you make life a little richer and are steady in a pinch. They might have a big-screen television now, but the television will never be more important than people. If you sit on a bench beside them, they talk to you. Whatever all this is, it's a mentality that is as relaxed and refreshing as tall grass in summer, changing leaves in sunshine, hot breakfasts on a cold morning. And here in the city it is an uncommon flower. But then again, common enough that I am staying, for at least another year.

The man arrived, inevitably, in a labyrinth. The exact details of how he arrived are unimportant. Everyone arrives in a labyrinth at some point, awaking unexpectedly in the middle, not quite sure whether they meandered casually in, choice by choice, or leaned against a section of wall that, as in so many cartoons and movies, simply swiveled right around and plunked them somewhere else.

Unlike most labyrinths, there are no walls; the exit, then, is likely to be something other than a door. The curving, forking paths are separated by swaths of garden, cold-weather-hued green daubed with Queen Anne's Lace and wisteria and other delicate, complicated flowers. One would no sooner walk across it than push through a wall of thorns.

How, then, to find a way out? Left to chance, never; one needs a guide, an intuition, a principle to follow. Surely classical mythology has come up with a few of these; but who really has the time to look that up?

There are animals in the labyrinth. Grass and flower creatures: pillbugs, ants, butterflies, spiders, snails. When you arrive, a snail resting on a smooth gray stone happens to capture your attention. Looking closer at its shell, which seems grey when seen directly but turns every color just as you move your eyes. As you stand and walk away, the snail starts to turn and extends its eyes, waving them urgently in the other direction; you wait, it slowly -- rapidly, to be fair, to a snail -- glides forward.

It takes a while to find the way out. You're not quite there yet, and sometimes worry that you took a wrong turn somewhere, but at other times you believe in the entirety of the choices, that right and wrong are continually determined and possibilities renewed. At night you build a small fire at a fork in the path and fireflies keep you company, offering no advice but blinking warmly, more dense around you than in the darkness behind them. During the day, traveling slowly as you must behind the snail, you have time to think, to go running, to notice the other flowers. Sometimes you see another traveler and you call to one another across the paths, later sharing the light of a single campfire, calling to each other again until your choices have separated you once more.

It occurs to you that the purpose of the labyrinth may not be to find a way out, but to finally merge paths with someone else, and continue walking with them. What is there to do in the meantime, then, than try to live honestly and decently and try to choose wisely, however imperfect our wisdom.