Remembering What It Is To Be Alive

(I shall have to whisper it into your heart directly)

Photo by Joyce Hankins with gratitude

What are my bones yearning to express?

This is where I begin, at the top of my blank page. At the start of my unlived day.

I look up from my desk, looking for clues to help situate me.

The sun is strong this morning. It is splashing light across the raspberry leaves, the gone-to-seed spinach, the reliable grass. Before I finish the sentence, a cloud sidles in. All is muted. A naked poppy head wobbles in the faint breeze.

Here is impermanence. It stalks me like a TV mobster. I glance over at my hourglass, at the sand that keeps on trickling. It still astonishes me when I remember - I am forty eight. How much of my sand is left? When will I stop waiting for the future to arrive?

Here is suffering. The sludgy feeling in my stomach as I sit and look out through my tired eyes. The weeds that need pulling. The valley widening out, which is the Earth’s skin, which is (these days) prone to fevers. The Earth, who is getting sicker. Because of us. Because of me.

Where is meaning? It eludes me.

The dog interrupts to ask for his breakfast. He looks up at me with his clear brown eyes. They seem to say, I depend on you for this. I go to spoon out the mixture we batch-cooked at the weekend - brown lentils, veg, the creamy orange of sweet potatoes.

I notice the subtle call of hunger in my own stomach.

Here is meaning. There are dogs to be fed, and therapy clients to be witnessed, and spiritual questions to be replied to. There are carpets to be hoovered and plans to be written. There is a world to tend to. Gently. (And we are also the world.)

Here is beauty. A smattering of birdsong. The edges of the grey clouds where they soften to white. The blue beyond. The sweet happiness of the dog, who has eaten his fill, and who curls in his comfy bed beside my desk.

Here is love.

The page is never really blank. It is already teeming with lives and landscapes and ideas and terrors and consolations. We are only ever curating - choosing this word over that, this predictable action over that one. And.

Listen, I shall have to whisper it
into your heart directly: we are all
supernatural       every day
we rise new creatures     
cannot be predicted

~ Elaine Feinstein

I am hungry. It is time for me to eat.

Go gently,
Satya <3