The morning sun touches everything in my apartment. I can tell the angles are different than they were a month or two ago. The autumn light makes me wish I were a better student of the seasons. Intuitively, I know and feel and sense the changes, but I want something more precise than intuition. The cadence of the foghorn is drowned out by a siren approaching and then receding. After trying to recall a dream or two from last night’s rough and tumble sleep, I work on naming the things in the sunlight. The coffee pot. My cobalt blue mug. A gray flannel shirt draped over the arm of the sofa. the sage green and soft gray planters where young avocado trees grow. The bookshelf and its books. The two inches of whisky glowing amber and clear in the bottle on top of the dusty liquor cabinet.
I read a poem yesterday in which the speaker insisted on looking for and finding beauty despite current events. Somewhere else I read that focusing on and practicing kindness is an act of resistance in our current political climate. Paying attention to the morning light and the simple things in life seems like a similar act of resistance – a good reminder to not get too lost in the rhetoric of hypocrisy and politics and argumentation.
In one of the dreams, I was reconnecting with someone I had dated – though I can’t remember who. She had shared with me a notebook that was her diary from the time we had been apart – but was only sharing one page at a time. In a different dream or maybe a continuation of that one, we were at an outside picnic and there was a swarm of yellow jackets. In another one, someone in the office (which office I couldn’t say) had bought and used the wrong type of coffee filter and there were coffee grounds in the coffee and the basket was full of coffee sludge. Someone else brought donuts and the scene toggled between what looked like a classroom with desks in rows and the outside picnic area. In the classroom, I took the boss’ favorite seat (last seat in the far right column). The boss looked like the character Jimmy James from the TV show News Radio. None of it made much sense.
There’s a crow squawking from a nearby roof, more sirens in the distance. There’s still the foghorn and this morning light, and this urge to linger a little longer now complicated by the nagging desire to get on with the day.