I talked to a neighbor and felt connection.
I texted with a friend and felt solidarity and love. I worked on a project that is useful and that I have the resources to contribute to sustainably. The echinacea and the mint are fading and ragged in the late summer sun. I can feel autumn coming. Everything ends; everything begins again.
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I got an apology I never expected to get, and I held onto myself so hard while being compassionate for the other person.
I am turning 40 in one month, and I am ready for it. It's been a real long couple of days and I'm pulling one from the stacks. This memory is from the first warm spring day of the year about a month after I left my law job, when I was just starting to remember what it felt like to be a person.
I lay on my belly in the soft damp grassy earth at the edge of a pond and watched bugs and snakes and tadpoles and spiders skate and slither and wiggle and walk on water, while the sun baked my back. We went to the river and waded out on the sandbar, through glacial silt mixed with river sand. As we were coming back, the sun turned the river into a sheet of beaten gold.
There were thousands of cow parsnips, profusions of tiny white flowers collected into flat disks set at varying angles, and it looked like a cluster of galaxies. It rained. I was late to pick up my dad because I was videotaping bumblebees in an attempt to demonstrate that they walk just like pugs and have cute little smushed faces like pugs.
The heat wave broke, for real this time. I got to drink most of a passionfruit fizzy water, and I accidentally poured the rest of it on my feet as I tried to unwrap a half-melted energy bar while trudging down a hot, smoky sidewalk. While it was surprising, it was also refreshing, and not at all sticky, thus reminding me that fizzy water really is everything good about soda and none of the bad.
I listened to a lawyer describe a resume that would have had me twisting with envy two years ago, and instead of feeling envious, I thought about what it would actually be like to do that type of work. I knew that I would hate it, and that I was worthy and valid and real without it, and I felt so relieved and grounded and just like, "better you than me, friend." And even though being around lawyers again was a little bit like putting a damp, itchy sweater on, I could hold onto myself in the midst of it; I could remember how much I like myself and who I am and sit centered in that. When I was in college (like fifteen years ago!), I took a relaxation yoga class, which was taught by this elderly, cheerful, roly poly man who seemed like the essence of calm to me. We would do long visualizations, and the calming image that my brain thought up was a sand dune in a desert: warm, toast-colored sand, a soft hissing wind that sculpts the sand into tiny sparkling sharp-soft ridges, and a rectangle of fuchsia silk, rippling in the wind, against a deep blue sky.
A few weeks ago, I found a discounted remnant of fuchsia silk, left over from some fancy NYC designer's studio, and it's hanging in my window, rippling in the breeze of the fan. It feels really good to look at it. I felt totally disconnected from anything good or beautiful today, and it was too hot for fat dance class.
But I went anyway, and it was real, real hot, and we danced to Total Eclipse of the Heart, with much dramatic choreographed hair-swinging and forehead clutching and stomping. My knee was hurting and I should have left early, but in there was a part with four whole counts of giant air guitar circles, and I was so into it I practically dislocated my arm. I love that class so much I can't even handle it. Also, the dome light in my car started working again. I was busily doing computer things, and then I looked up and the moon was right there! It's a perfectly round orange coin hanging in the perfectly black sky. I looked at it with my binoculars and I can almost see Tycho, but my hands shake a little bit and I can't quite make it out. My windowpanes refract the light and make three more ghost moons in a line with it. It's impossibly beautiful.
I couldn’t find a fork for my cantaloupe pieces at work this afternoon, so I ate them with my fingers, sitting in my gray plastic cube in the gray concrete cube farm. They were so cold and so sweet and it made a mess and I felt like a living thing again. As I was coming home from work, the air was delicately pink with smoke and sunset. I did a vulnerable and courageous thing and people were loving and affirming and I felt like I had done good work, and like I was part of a strong, wise, kind, powerful community. I wrote all day in cool, dim, quiet living room.
The nectar is flowing in the mint in my yard, and its fuzzy purple botttlebrush flowers are full of golden honeybees all day. I don't like the mint because it's invasive, but the bees like it, and I like watching them like it more than I dislike its invasiveness. I also appreciated that they didn’t sting me when I went galumphing through their workspace with the recycling bin this afternoon. I was out of bread this morning and going to the store before breakfast was too hard to contemplate. But I was not out of tamales, and it turns out tamales make an excellent substrate for eggs. There are a lot of really good kinds of vegan cheese these days. I resigned myself to a cheeseless hellscape ten years ago, when there was only soy cheese and almond cheese, and I don't even want to talk about Daiya. If Follow Your Heart provolone can taste like cow provolone, there really is hope. The scientific name for a sunflower is helianthus and that is probably the prettiest word in the whole world. The neighbor across the street is growing a helianthus forest. They fill half her yard. I've been watching them for months and they are at least eight feet tall now, with green green green leaves bigger than my hand, rustling in the breeze and nodding in the sunlight. |
AuthorBitter Water
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June 2019
Categories© Francie Nevill and Every Sweet Thing, 2017.
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