Exactly as We Are
Dear friend,
If I turn my head and look over my left shoulder, I see the moon watching—looking straight in through the kitchen door. The energy in the neighbourhood feels slightly fractious. The grass in the park is drying to yellow straw, and with more people using the park, more trash is thrown around. Two little kids get into punching each other, and it turns nasty—one of them getting kicked to the floor.
A young woman intervenes, and the bigger boy walks off. A friend of his hangs back and explains to the woman that they’re brothers.
I’m watching too, from the raised path around the edge of the park. I remember how mean I was to my brother sometimes growing up. The kid on the ground stops crying and gets on his scooter, chasing after his tormentor, who tells him to stop following and get lost. The scene looks tawdry. I look up and see jets crossing paths and get this sensation of a culture drowning in its own mess.
Back home, Fifty Cent and Mary J. Blige are playing. From our garden, the music from the stadium comes as a low rumble, interspersed with the roar of the crowd. It’s kind of annoying.
This morning I stood in the River Lea, watching blue damselflies and cabbage butterflies playing in the river grasses, with Bessie splashing in the shallows. It felt like paradise—the morning sun washing the lush green banks in gold.
I took a video, but watching it back, in my eagerness not to drop the phone in the river, I had my thumb partly over the lens—and the damselflies and butterflies are almost invisible in the footage.
Still, it felt good to be in the water, feeling the mud between my toes, listening to the breeze in the grasses and the trees. Breathing. Bessie’s great to walk because she stays close, the way Santy did. You have that feeling of being a unit, exploring together. She’s so well behaved I know she’ll leave the joggers and cyclists in peace. She’s a great friend, and I’m very glad for her company. Whenever she stays, I’m always reluctant to take her home. She’s such a sweet presence.
Each one of us really is enough, exactly as we are.
Just by being, we enrich the world.
Someday, the majority of us will live with that knowledge front and centre.
We’re so driven by our culture to get somewhere or be someone we feel we’re not, you can miss your whole life—in a perpetual state of transit.
So intent on the next moment, we miss this one.
The one we’re in now.
One step.
One breath at a time.
It’s easier to be in the moment when you’re standing in a river, watching butterflies.
A swallow flits past, picking off the last of the evening insects as the sky slowly shifts from turquoise to indigo. Soon the stars will be out.
In stars we were forged, and by the light of a star we live.
Star beings.
On a living Earth.
In the miracle of life.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey