Detail
It’s getting difficult now, being a young Rubik’s Cube. Disordered, mixed, striving. Pulled apart, not quite, an undone version of myself. So it’s such a relief to drive to work and see a tractor hauling, not one, but two bales of hay; to feel the jackrabbit thump in my sternum seeing the red remains of an animal on the steaming pavement; to wish I was better at loving Jesus and more like that condor reading the air current like the oldest language, like Braille. It’s such a relief to be alive, even while in pixels.
Two things about me: I work at a local tea room serving tea to the placid members of the community who find time for peace, and I lately have been having a cold. This is important because the other day, while making peach tea, the scent of peaches hit me so strongly that I realized how long it had been since I was able to smell anything. How long I had been living without being fully aware and awake to all of life. Peach is a particularly strong trigger for me; it takes me two places: First, back to high school when I had my wisdom teeth out and I survived on peach smoothies until my gums were not such raw asterisks of living. The second place it takes me is Georgia. I’ve never been to Georgia, but I loved someone who has. See how acutely life will pierce you, if you let it?
I practice being aware of life, an observer of the details. The shape of the cracks in the pavement, for instance.
My neighborhood has new builds all the time. Whenever I am taking a walk and see the stacks of lumber in the road, I detour, I stick my face as near to the wood as a lover’s neck, and breathe the intoxicating pine, deep. And I don’t care what sort of unfeeling, rich people are looking out their windows at me.
When I grocery shop, the sadness of humanity is enough to kill me. A blind man asking random passersby what flavor drink he is holding; sweet-faced, bedraggled children asking for strawberries; and has there ever been so moving a scene as a worn blue collar lost, wandering in the bread aisle? I stare too much, but it is because I need the details of what I feel in my cornerstone, and because it all matters, even if I am not looking. But I am looking.
When I left work, it was dusk and the sky was a great grey, as the ocean at feeding hour. I watched an airplane trace across the atmosphere, a giant game piece advancing very rapidly in life. Then I felt, as a poet does, that it was someone else’s piece altogether. And there was a great stillness.