Not sure where this goes, if I had a journal I liked, it would go there but I am using a bunch of random ones and none of them feel right. So it goes here.
I was walking the lake this morning, it is earth day and only later did I realize how many people were out doing clean up, plastic buckets, plastic grabbers, plastic gloves, to clean up plastic from the lake.
I’d only had one cup of coffee and a migraine pill, my mind wasn’t quite awake. It settled into song and a taste of drama. I noticed the blue of the water contrasting with the yellow of branches, the slight new greens of the buds, or red berries. It was beautiful. I started to laugh at my little nibble of drama, imagined every passer by was doing the same. All of us with chewing gum of relationship conflict and power dynamics…uncertainty and questions.
It made me laugh.
The breeze was out, and I wondered how many times I’d been nourished or frozen still by it. How little I remember, at 41, my middle aged self- how much have I forgotten… of course there are some memories to recall, the easy ones, trudging through the Morris winters, but how many times while walking from car to house, to job, to a friends house, to the coffee shop, on this very lake?
How we forget. What else have I forgotten I wondered, what else am I not noticing? I started trying to take other perspectives…
As I noticed things, I considered what I would tell a person who has lost their sight. There are robins on the ground, geese and ducks in the water, there are song birds overhead, that tree’s branches rise up to the sky, they are orange and without leaves - so that collectively it looks like the flame of a candle against the blue sky behind it, gradually my observations began to change, to become story like, there is a mother tree, she’s on her 51st sprouting, she’s tired, but can’t imagine stopping anytime soon. There is a weeping willow, it’s been growing slowly and for so long, it loves the fresh breeze which allows it to feel close to others, to remember it’s not so alone, it’s long strands brushing casually against a myriad of others. There is a grandfather tree, with three granchildren planted near it, they wrestle and toy about, but it stands wise with age. There are two geese who spent the winter in Alabama, normally they’d go further south, but this year was too hot, and they rested with the old retired folks, in the pools of the snowbirds. There is a bench made of old planks that still remember Canada, they were torn, and shiver now stripped of their clothes, lacquered… and held in place by cement pulverized mountains, stones from Georgia, and the lake beds of Michigan. They remember… not consciously, but they have a feeling of their old lives…
Like those plastic garbage and recycling bins remember the millions of years they spent resting in a pool of themselves, slick oil sludge, locked in the ground, complacent… and then one day unsettled, shook free, and on a wild ride, pulled to the surface, scoured, molded, made anew… they remember being the dirt, being grass, being dinosaurs and now they eat the waste we throw at them.
I walked around imagining the drops of water in the lake, but first each little wave, unable to fathom such a multitude, their journey from rain, to stream, to lake, to drinking water, to sweat and blood, to release, to thunderous storms…
Each drop a human with their own drama, their own story, their own painstaking journey, Arjuna fretting over his horror that he must slay his own kin, and how old is this story? a drop drowning out another drop, a thousand of us merged with a thousand of them… and in the swirl, oh…
The lake scum, releasing its gas, like the new planet light years from here, where there could be life doing the same… how many trillions?
I don’t remember… but some part of me knows that my veins mimic the lines the tree branches and roots grow in, and that the same breath I release fuels them the way they give back to me… and that we were both forged of the sun, where hydrogen merged with hydrogen, growing more complex until it created the stones, and the soil and the lake scum, and the bacteria in my sweat, and the bark of the tree, the law multiplying and growing more complex but always- and that Buddha says the mountain has not been worn away… so how many millions of lives will take place before we remember that we were, will be, are, constant.
I am that.
And I smile as I walk by people at the lake, and they smile back, and there is a secret between us that neither of us can fathom at that moment. That we are.
I walk further down the path and remember that I am the bird swooping, and the willow swinging, and the dog panting, and the cloud floating by… that I’ve been and will be and it’s very comforting to know that all is, and was, and that my drama is part of it, but also so inconsequential… and I can just love. Love the cold, and love the pain in my foot, and love the sadness in my heart, and love the runner racing by…
And then because I’m not on my last swipe… I grow hungry, and start to plan my day, and I am lost in my guise again. And that too, is part of it.