This Is What Happens

One day the words filled up with meaning, complex and voluminous. The shadows on the ground acquired depth––they were hollow shapes I had to step around or tumble into. All the extraneous blather and poetic palaver ceased…fingers to lips, listening for what matters, alert to the significance. The clock no longer ticked.

This is what happens. Everything pending has arrived. Every move counts.

In the morning I walked east along the shore to the broken pieces of the sea wall, scattered across the sand like an art installation. The surf washed over the bones of a hoofed animal, again and again exposing it and covering it up, and a great blue heron glided by.

I recalled a quote from Muriel Barbery:

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death. Oh my gosh, I thought, does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?

I think the answer is maybe so.

The temperatures have been rising and the fire threat is high. The thermometer says that it’s 98 degrees in the shade outside.

I've been wanting to write about these kinds of things: The secrets we begin to accumulate as we age that only the old can know, the simultaneous sense of wonder and grief, the way everything seems to have a soul.

I honestly don't know if I'm going crazy or just becoming more aware, and sometimes it's even scary, but sometimes, to borrow words from my poet-friend Dan Gerber, it's just "the boat's gentle rocking in the field of stars".