To Join

A couple of days ago, during the afternoon, there was a spontaneous lull in the craziness. I went outside and discovered sixty-five degree sunshine--the first! Walk time! It was wonderful--felt like energy and vitamin D were just pouring into a dry-sponge self.

Blue. Green. Daffodils, tulips. Lawnmowers going, kids playing outside...the meter-reader guy smiling and waving. Then the dirt road into a patch of woods on the edge of town, the cooler hollows still holding puddles, trees muffling all sounds but themselves in the sparkling clean breeze. I was hitting the point where everything was thoroughly warmed up, stride relaxing, animal-self taking over. This is often where I sink into full attention. Senses sharpen, and I am less a conductor and more a note in the symphony.

I smelled the leftover dankness in the woods from the last months of rain...familiar, mushroomlike, composting earth. I love it. Suddenly there was a new topnote, a flash and flutter of sweetness. What was that...? I halted in the road, remembering the exact scent from somewhere in childhood. Brain tried to name it, giving up in just a few seconds...some fairy-flower, I'm sure, throwing itself upon the little gust over the ridge, swooping down to tantalize me. An emotion arose, love-delight-longing, as powerful as the scent was delicate.

After a moment, I continued down to the end of the road, turned around, retraced my steps. Coming back into the shaded hollow, there the perfume was again--pure and fine as a spiderweb, here and gone.

I wanted to share this. I wanted to look at another human and say, "What IS that? Did you smell it?"

My desire began musing about itself. 

I headed toward home, thinking/feeling, while I rolled up my sleeves for the liquid sun. The contemplation is old: How it is that aloneness is so total. Even if another human had been present, he or she could never know this experience in exactly the way I do. Sometimes, I feel sad about that. In another sense, aloneness is complete to the point that it can't even really be.

But sharing--I miss it. Sharing is what fills in the spaces between the bones of my life, the way leaves fill in the canopy of a tree, rounding it out, sending things skyward, communing in waves, touching, dancing, or growing still in the twilight. Sharing adds untold dimension, unimaginable (on one's own) depth. It's what we do, whether we believe it or not, deliberately or accidentally. It's one of the reasons I babble to myself with this mediating screen. We get as close as we possibly can from our single-point perspective--if we got any closer, we would vanish. Still...

There are many "levels" of being, as anyone with any imagination or sensitivity can attest, all interacting and sharing with each other. I roam the range from not entertaining any concept of aloneness or togetherness at all, to "I love this unity, including myself", to "wow, there really is no self!", to "I want to remember kissing, dammit!" All these states are present from time to time, and don't create as much havoc as they might have long ago. They all make patterns in something ineffable, with varying degrees of feeling/thought.

When I arrived back at the house, I found my son restlessly seeking car keys.

"It's SO beautiful outside, I'm giddy!...What's wrong?"

"Nothing", he replied, "everything. I don't know. Can I go for a drive?"

"Sure...(he was almost snorting and pawing!)...let me guess...testosterone volcano, nowhere to go?"

Sigh. "Yeah."

"Just wait," I teased, as he left the room. "It's almost sundress weather."

"Then I'll be pissed," he growled/laughed. 

I wanted to say Oh, just love it, love it while you can, painful as it can be. Precious longing, irritating itch, cherry-blossom fever. On one hand, a search for security, sensation, power. On another...the illusion ends, desire changes form, comes and goes, temporary as springtime. @)~>~~~