Weird But F—in’ Wonderful
My daughter sent a picture of Felix, his back to the camera, a little boy in a red soccer uniform walking out onto a field of bright green grass beneath a perfect blue sky. He always seems to be walking away from us, or running away, heading into the future with wholehearted exuberance, and his love of life is palpable. In a little while, we’ll have our weekly FaceTime chat with him, which means that bribed with sweets and the promise of a cartoon afterwards, he will endure us for ten minutes, in his fidgety and distracted way, and then, having completed his obligation, will say something like, “Bye, Poo-Heads. I love you!” and scamper away. We don’t mind. We take what crumbs we can get.
Besides, I have my own love affair with life going on. I know I keep saying this, but the world has been so beautiful, I literally stop in my tracks several times a day to sigh and wonder and catch my breath. It is breaking my heart, this world, but I am madly in love.
At my Medicare so-called “wellness” visit, my doctor told me that it’s good that I walk a lot, but I should also practice other kinds of movement, like break into a run sometimes, or hop around, switching legs from one to the other, and maybe actually pick up those little chartreuse dumbbells I bought two years ago and try some bicep curls. Taking her advice, which I don’t always do, I impulsively varied my stride as I walked to the mailbox, hastening my pace, skipping a bit, and attempting a twirl, and suddenly I was dancing. It felt good. And I’m probably one of the most un-hip people you will ever meet, but I actually had a Taylor Swift song playing on my phone from a list of random downloads, and I was liking it. The song was called Snow on the Beach, and I’m way beyond breakups with boys or the days when a guy wanting or not wanting me could decide whether my pockets were filled with stars, or I was flying in my dreams, but I must say, the refrain felt right:
…it’s like snow at the beach Weird but fuckin' beautiful
Thank you, Taylor, (poet and goddess who I hope helps save democracy) for those lines which I can’t stop hearing in my head. Because that’s how things are nowadays. Outrageous and implausible, like snow on the beach and then some. There are white bouquets of ceanothus in the hills, a bluebird in the toyon tree, oranges like little suns heavy in the trees, and I can hear the creek rushing and roaring even as I sit here typing, and those glaring green hills are almost blinding, and there are stars in the ocean, and dreams in my flight, and that isn’t even all of it.
I am not oblivious to the horrors out there, but I’m reckoning with my own dilemmas and trying to see what’s here in front of me. All of my friends are feeling vulnerable lately, loss has come in so many ways, and we hold each other upright, grateful to be here together. But the wonders are not to be denied, and we shall navigate our transformations bravely, and try to do some good.
Meanwhile, I’m always influenced by whatever book I am reading, and I just started one by Katherine Rundell called Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne. Rundell speaks of a constant that runs through all of Donne’s work: “He remained steadfast in his belief that we, humans, are at once a catastrophe and a miracle.”
God, I am feeling that lately. Catastrophe and miracle, in equal measure. And each soul so unsparingly original.
“Tap a human, Donne believed, and they ring with the sound of infinity.”
Maybe I’m crazy, but now and then I open up and spill out everywhere until I merge with the sky, and that’s what I was feeling when I danced and skipped in the canyon on the way to our flooded mailbox, with shimmering green hills on either side of me. And it was weird but fuckin’ beautiful, and I was sad and happy and ephemeral and infinite and very much in love.
And now I get to say hello to Felix, who is only just beginning. Hi, Poo-Head.