A Moment to Breathe and to Be and to Feel
Something calls to me and so I try to pay attention.
This week I got to take a break, and by that I mean it was a weekday, between the hours of nine and five, and that I ought to have been working or at least doing other productive things, but instead I closed my laptop on the kitchen table next to the supermarket flowers I’d been typing beside - orange and red and yellow blooms, their plastic pot wrapped in copper foil - and I simply left my house and walked into the woods.
And when I’d gone two miles or so along the trail I came across a bridge spanning the creek. I walked to the center of the bridge, about 12 paces, and when I leaned against the wooden handrail it lurched outwards, the vertical support beam directly in front of me having long since rusted away from its concrete foundation at my feet.
It’s funny, that kind of juxtaposition:
Object X used to support Object Y.
But now, Object X has detached from the foundational structure, and thus depends on its remaining attachment to Object Y for its existence.
This observation is not dispassionate. Something about this eroding structure reflects my own state of affairs.
Above, November clouds sweep eastward, quicksilver with a shimmer of gold.
Their movement captivates me. So does the creek below. Fast, but unhurried. Determined, but smooth. Yes, I’d like to be more like this.
Or like the artist upstream, who I can just make out working her brush over canvas. Another kind of flow.
On the walk home, a woodpecker raps across half of a fallen tree, relentless.
Foundations are shifting. Old structures are crumbling. New faces emerge from between the trees, waving hello at me, and their dogs too. The leaves keep falling, and falling, and falling, making an amber and scarlet carpet.
I am not yet home. But already, I am not the same.
