I awoke too early and could not fall back asleep… my mind ricocheting from words to scenes to conjecture to connection. Last night I wasn’t sure how to build a written piece from random thoughts drifting through like tendrils of mist. Now I find it hard to dodge the pelting hailstones and come back with just a simple cup of rainwater to sip.
Imagine this: You are walking through a park. The Sun strikes a patch of ferns nearby and it catches your eye. You move in closer… closer. They’re low to the ground so you crouch down low to see them better. Shifting this way and that, different angles show fronds and fiddleheads striking new poses for your pleasure. Shadows and sunlight intertwine. Shapes overlap, are hidden, then revealed. Your everyday self is lost as the world shrinks into the fractal echoes of fern on fern, and you begin to feel like one tiny finger of a frond of a fern in a patch on a hill. As those echoes reverberate outward now, you realize you are sitting in a shaft of light sent all the way from a distant star, beyond planets and moons and comets streaking by. You thought you were just strolling through the park, but you are actually spinning through space. And time. Those ferns? 300 million years old. And you almost didn’t stop to say Hi.
Now you continue your walk, trying to clear your head, down around the bend and over the wooden bridge. You see a deer path, so you veer off the people path (it’s probably a coyote path, too) to see where it goes. And speaking of deer, look down, there are some bones right now. They’re so bright! Crouching down again, you catch quick little movements in the layers of matted grass: ants! Oh, probably the ones responsible for these beautiful, polished bones. Thorough job, guys. And look over there – a little swatch of deer hair, blending into the grass, and so grasslike itself. That would be a good way to go: just blend in after feeding the ants.
Yesterday I noticed some ants in town, traveling in a line along the top of a retaining wall, behind the cookie company. I put some cookie crumbs nearby, and watched a few ants discover them. I was surprised how many just scurried past in such a hurry to get elsewhere, the same type who would walk right past a patch of ferns, I’ll bet. But a few stopped to investigate, while one go-getter even zipped off with a small crumb held high…
“Mama, looky what I just found! Can I keep it?”
“No, child. We must relinquish it to the Internal Crumb Service.”
Now leaving the deer path and threading through some trees, certain elements – little twigs, new leaves – start to stand out, dark against the sunny background. So easy to not notice these glimpses of grace; how many other things do we not see at any – at every – moment? Little sights, little sounds, distant smells, stray thoughts. Do coyotes sing for joy, or to lament the times they did not sing? How many treks by how many deer does it take to tramp a new trail? How many bones lie underfoot, here where we stand? How much of the grass is actually fallen fur blending in? Can we learn to uncurl like a fern in the sun for even three hours, let alone three hundred million years? If a twig can be its perfectly imperfect singular self either standing alone or in a crowd of comrades, surely we can, too? (“Perhaps. But don’t call me Shirley.”)
Well, Shirley ( – please don’t tell me what to do!), there’s precious little that is sure in this world. Which is why it’s This World and not some other, some That World. If the astronomers do see past the comets and find another planet that can support life, and the astronauts get there and set up shop, will it be as prone to problems as this one? Is there a more perfect planet somewhere else? Some place where the equivalent of ferns speak more eloquently than they do here? Some place where all the bones are clean and white without help? But what kind of world would it be without the travel of ants among the ten thousand grasses and the deer hair and the cookie crumbs? And would the cookies not even crumble?
Imagine: No. Listen: The ferns and the twigs and the clean white bones say, Just be here in this world and just be yourself.
The matted grass and mingled hair say, We’re all in this together.
The quick little ants say, The trick is to enjoy the crumbs, too.
It doesn’t take a telescope to see that. And it doesn’t take an astronaut to explore new worlds. It’s all right here, right now.
blue like the sky 