What sort of impossibility brings you to awareness of one moment, sudden or not? I wonder that at times.
We said we must document this somehow as soul nourishment for parched times ahead, which was more a projection of now, than anything predictive.
But still beauty helps.
One picked apple sticks; blossom laden, white-pink petals drifting slowly down to ferns below when touched- the other was across in the ditch capturing something on film. Film because there is no more challenge in digital. Film photography using a 1980 camera he got second hand.
I walked on ahead and felt like I wanted to run.
But why? My life is beautiful!
Why did I want to run away down the red dirt road to the water's edge?
Down the road to where we saw the blue flag iris just minutes before on first pass by.
Blue flag iris were in my wedding bouquet, late June, twenty four years ago. I love the delicate beauty they offer to wet roadsides. I love them easier than I love many things and people. I struggle at times with loving but not of wildflowers.
Wildflowers-- I love them all. In fact, I love them with abandon and a passion I offer freely. No guarding of self in protection.
There were buttercups and horsetail lining the ditch as I walked along leaving the others behind with the car pulled off. And lupins--so strange to have lupins and blue flag iris at once along the same stretch of road.
Are any of these wild, or like me, just another garden escape?
I walked and walked and though night was not far off I felt as though I might walk forever and not be unhappy or tired-- the walking there on that red dirt road just felt so good.
And then a mosquito landed on my face and I suddenly felt freezing cold even though I had on a toque, scarf, sweater and coat, mid-June.
Ahh reality is a mixed bag at the best of times, isn't it?
How do you swat mosquitoes off your face without touching your face?
COVID-19 has presented so many unanswered questions.
Like how do you not make everyone in your life angry at you when you are not up for the new ways of socially engaging and celebrations while you are doing your very best to show up each morning?
Is it bullying when someone gets angry at you for your not feeling comfortable yet with how they want things to be socially.
Are public health guidelines designed to be pushed?
Why doesn't everyone else see the world as black and white as me? (Was I born with the wrong film in the figurative camera?)
Why are things so complicated now when I have fewer resources for resourcing with?
Is beauty a resource?
There is still so much I want to ask the world but how when all one's energies seem driven to the nailhead of survival? Is beauty required for survival? Because I don't seem to survive well in its absence. I need it like I need air and water. And I have never been particularly skilled at hitting nailheads.
Oh well.
This evening our youngest submitted an essay/ letter she wrote from her future self in ten years time to her current self. It was for the Goi Peace Foundation's international essay contest. It felt like a brave undertaking to write a letter letting yourself know the state of the world and where you are at personally in ten years from now, even imaginary. She was excited to take on the challenge and produced a beautiful essay with such youthful optimism in the face of myriad and unprecedented global challenges. Her essay, so true to herself, both in style and content was so nice to help support her with. Doing so made me feel glad for her hopefulness in the face of so much uncertainty.
And I do think there is much to be hopeful for but much also to grieve.
Losses abound in all of our lives and yet, there are brave souls willing to bear witness to that which is less beautiful.
Greta Thunberg was last year's shining example of such bravery and now those blazing trails in the Black Lives Matter movement and the front line COVID-19 workers share in this year's bravery awards. There are youth imagining their way to better futures, demanding to be heard and there are elders who are calling us back to where we have come from after too long a time a part.
Thank god for all of this.
And there are wildflowers in meadows and roadside ditches. Plants like the medicinal horsetail as ancient as time itself reminding me to stay rooted in that which provides me with sustenance.
But still, on hard days I want to span epochs.
I want the perspective the clouds had in this evening's glorious sunset. High up and looking down at the full catastrophe so that it all just sort of fades into a billowy drift of hot pink, slate grey. Hot pink, slate grey billows.
This evening's panorama of brush strokes had such scale and depth and layering it all looked casually intentional. As though it was awash with something like the pink cheeked glow post sex or tears or both. Shining and darkening and then darkening to a dwindle of colour. Afterglow. Post anything happy or real.
Wait--happy is still possible and good!
And then I realized that like the fallen, fading apple blossoms and the forget-me-nots whose blue dazzle are passing and the lupins whose glory has not fully risen yet, there are times for bloom and times to fade. There are peaks and troughs in all our lives. Epochs can tell us the same sweet and sad story that succession of a wet meadow to forest does. So too can little moments of paying attention. Sudden or not. We are here now and part of something so grand and tiny both. Such a beautiful and terrifying thought! And so we must bear witness to the whole of it. And again. And try to fall back into loves arms while they are there to catch us as we drop. Falling, falling and trusting like yesterday's blossoms making way for something new.
Thanks for reading,
Be well,
Jill