Dear Friend,
Something about the banks of blue grey cloud this morning, London’s drizzling rain brings a feeling of home. The moisture interspersed with bursts of bright spring sunlight. Rainbows in the oil spillages, startling against the slick black tar macadam. Iridescent patterns of colour in the plumage of starlings. The air a cold compress, reviving and refreshing for a body, freshly woken from sleep.
I’m looking after Zara while Katie recovers from her operation, or maybe Zara is looking after me. She’s filled the house with little fluffy clouds of hair. Is lying stretched out on the rug as I write.
Yesterday walking with her on the marshes I realised I’m living a life I would once thought impossible. When you love animals you have to push aside awareness of the mismatch in life spans. When the unthinkable happens you belive you’ll never love again, and then along comes a creature to teach you that love never dies. Love finds us.
In the details.
The swish of a tail. The excitement of the trail the foxes left in the pre-dawn. The rainbows in the road. Beauty in the every day. We can miss it in the rush from this moment to next.
You wonder where we’re going, what are we searching for that isn’t here now?
What really matters more than peace of mind?
Sure I’ll be glad when the hoover has sucked up the hair fluff, and the plants have been watered and spoken with. Work tasks await. Negotiations yet to be entered into.
As the particulars of the day unfold, there’s a presence. You begin you recognise who this presence is. It has always been here. It is who we are.
The world will rarely line up so that everything is done, and it will only do so for a moment and then there’ll be the next thing, and the next.
This is the treadmill we unwittingly step onto when we set our sights on becoming happy and good with ourselves some time in the future.
The grumbling and judging and complaining self, let it do its thing.
There will always be something left undone.
Work, kids, scheduling. Time squeezed.
Our happiness cannot depend solely on the world.
Someone graffitied William Henry Davies poem, Leisure on a wall where we walked with Santy. There’s something comforting about its reminder to step out of the stream of thinking and doing and simply to be.
Leisure by William Henry Davies What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night. No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance. No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began. A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey x