Emergence

As with the garlic, planted last October, there is emergence, slow re-engagement.  I’m beginning to move into pieces of my basic routine again, trailing used Kleenex.  The essential core of the cold has dissipated, leaving in its wake drippy congestion and a luxurious fatigue, drawing me under from time to time.

The quiet is magical, when I let it be.  There is a wave-like sense of time and space that comes only from having disengaged from the “regular” world for a while.  I am temporarily unhinged from my internal overseer and his demands of proper productivity and attendant schedule.  It is not the time to increase muscle mass; I’m not guilty that I’m not at the gym.  My brain power is diminished; urgency around decisions fades away. The winter garden is slowed to self-sufficiency, and besides that, we have no critical eye for the winter garden.  And my live-in partner is out of town.

Without an external scaffolding of engagement and commitment, time itself seems to shift.  It seems to open and expand somehow, softening. Despite the quiet, or perhaps because of it, there is a vitality here, a nourishment. I can rest here, for the moment, perhaps  heal within it, and through osmosis, come back with some of the silence.

From Mary Oliver:

Sunrise


You can
die for it - 
an idea,
or the world. People


have done so,
brilliantly,
letting 
their small bodies be bound


to the stake, 
creating
an unforgettable fury of light. But


this morning
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar
fabric of dawn, I thought


of China,
and India
and Europe, and I thought
how the sun


blazes
for everyone just
so joyfully
as it rises
under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought
I am so many!
What is my name?


What is the name 
of the deep breath I would take
over and over
for all of us?  Call it
whatever you want, it is
happiness, it is another one
of the ways to enter
fire.

From: New and Selected Poems, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992),  pp. 125-6.