How to see what's right in front of you
June ran off barefoot, left the other shoe behind.
It thundered and poured outside, and deep in my chest.
It stirred up old ghosts I still miss,
and laid new blessings at my feet.
What did June bring you?
The water is moving, alive, a surface of ripples and churns. It flashes silver, bruise-blue, bottle green, and then disappears beneath me, swallowed by the next stroke, the next wave.
I do not stop to look too closely. I do not peer under rocks or into tidepools. I don’t press my nose to the glass of this world. I move. I move because stillness, to me, has always felt like forgetting.
I move because I remember.
Even when the world is beautiful, I feel the pull to go further, to find out what’s next, what’s hidden just over that rise, under that wave, behind that idea. I do not long to settle in the moment. I long to fly through it.
And I know it makes me miss things. The small and the still and the shy. The dust-mote hearts and the thousand tiny dancers. But I am not wired for slow revelation. I am wired for seeking.
To sit still feels like giving up on life. Not soft not holy. The other kind. The hands in the air with a shrug. The becoming fog. And I, I want to burn through this life like a comet tail.
I envy people who can be still, yes. Who settle in and let the world unfurl slowly before them, like petals. I envy their calm. But I do not want to be them. I want to chase the flower before it opens. I want to imagine it in bloom and run headlong toward it.
My partner tells me sometimes: look.
And I do. But my looking is a different kind. It is quick, it is sharp, it is fleeting. I gather beauty like berries in a bowl and keep moving.
I don’t measure time in pauses. I measure it in questions. In flashes of light. In the wind in my ears as I leap from one idea to the next, in the way I breathe harder when I feel inspired. I measure time by how often I lose it.
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See you next Wednesday! 🧡
WONDERFUL. There's enough here for a long, long discussion about mindfulness and experience and the assumptions we are making (here in the stupid west) about what it means to seek, to see, to realize, to experience life. This is fantastic and you should flesh it out and get it published. There are journals specifically geared toward this kind of work. It needs to be read!
I imagine you eating the berries as you pick them and coming home with an empty bowl because you loved so in the moment.