I waited for you,
sitting gutter-side with
all of autumns leaves beneath my shoes.
Yellow creases,
brown-edged endings.
You stepped onto the street
through the stiff-hipped gate
and grinned.
I grinned inside, too.
Did you realise,
see it as I did?
We were waving red flags
at each other then.
“ Everything’s one thing. It’s not a matter of connectivity, it’s an indivisibility. A unity. I can feel the world reaching away around me in every direction, the world and everything alive in it, every bud and leaf and bird and frog and bat and horse and tiger and human being, every fern and clubmoss, every fish and fowl, every serpent, all the sap and blood warmed by the sun, everything touched by light, everything hidden in the darkness. It’s all one. There isn’t a me or a not-me about it. It’s all continuous and I’m alive with everything that lives. ”
John Burnside
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
~ Lao Tzu
This has caused pause.
A pause that comes whilst preparing a grapefruit for a dessert, peeling this fruit with direct force. Knifing through the outer layers. Length of blade hangs a moment in the air just above this visible skin, what could be the external showpiece of my own internal life. Necessary protection for what is held within. Cutting through thick white pith before finding luminous and pale ruby flesh. Jewel-like, sliced into a shape that fits the palm of my hand. Juice seeps from each incision made for clean-edged segments. Taking fruit to pieces, dismantling the whole.
That will be made into something wholly new. To be eaten, and made into something new again. So it goes.
Here is the waver, and the breathing space that comes from being provoked into looking again at aspects of living that are often taken for granted. For paring back the superficial film of daily life in order to peer in at all twinkling and labour-weighted fragments that have brought us to this point. The great depth of reasoning that can underpin each action, every thought.
This chance at reflection makes for gratefulness; this pause allows appreciation to soak into even the most minute of exploits undertaken in daily living. Noticing the food that is drunk, the effect it has on belly and mind and the extension of hands from my own person to that of others.
It is not just thoughts that have been affected by the readings, or conversations had in recent weeks. Thoughts are heavily connected to each movement, and so every task undertaken has had a new light cast upon it.
Living has become a little more awake, a little more profound.
Every sliver of ruby grapefruit, a little more unique.
“i have buried you
every place i’ve been
you keep ending up
in my shaking handsi have buried you
”
with my shaking hands
you keep ending up
every place i been
Justin Vernon
It is a source of irrefutable delight, this fact that I go to school. A college, to be more precise. It fills my weeks like water in a dam that had begun to crack for lack of rain; a salve for split heels after walking too long without destination.
Learning in a setting such as this, though, is a rather consuming experience. In all my living, nothing really exists; no theory or ideal can be leaned upon with full weight until my gut trusts it. Having a set amount of work to get through each week, even if it is in a holistic environment, makes me suddenly aware at how slow a learner I am due to this desire to digest completely an idea before placing faith in it.
I must taste the world through my unconscious body. For any one thing to continue to be, it must run the gamut of my senses.
