The wind blew through new leaves, now completely unfurled, southwest to northeast. That is the direction of the sun. I sat with my daughter and thought: “How I will miss my mountainside, riverside seat.” And then I thought, better: “How much I have enjoyed my mountainside, riverside seat.” One thought closed the heart, the next opened it.
When the night had fully fallen, I cooked myself a meal: I was contented with the vegetable flavors and the tiny torch of habanero. I poured the last of that bottle of wine. With glass at eye level (dramatically, for an audience of none) I turned and saluted my rooms. They were as they had always been: Buddha in the corner and Bible in the bookcase; a banner for the Earth in the window, while a guitar dreamed against the sill; the successful house plantings overflowing their containers; and chairs set casually away from the table where visitors, late for their homes, had pushed them. What I have watered, I have been.
The things that held my life unchanged, ineffably (predictably) had now been rearranged. A few short months ago, this space was full of dreams and losses, my passions and attempts, my future’s arrows quivered but destined for unseen targets, my little hopes and my big ones, the fears that shape me, the courage that frees me from that shape. I looked around me now: not one dream missing. Every cherished (or: feared, respected) Me, when called by name, jumped up shouting “Present!”
But here, what’s this?
Had a movement caught my eye? In the mirror, a changed expression. The river’s louder; or the whispers through the leaves adopted some new dialect. The birds (they’d all come back: they always do) repeat those odd expressions, too. Or a little dust from out there in, that my shoes had not been tracking? How to explain? It’s all right here, as plain as plain, exactly as it’s been.
Ah, look: flowers on the table — she bought them, she left them — for us, for me. Without her here, these rooms are spilling over with everything I’ve been, and even so and even full are empty as can be.
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