Tonight felt larger than most. I drove out to a sunset bar – ok, maybe not exactly that poetic, but it was outside and the weather was divine. I sat above a small stretch of lawn lined with tables and Adirondack chairs and a brook with silvering rapids. I read some poetry and wrote. I felt like I saw everything – my eyes were wide to the world. I watched a chubby toddler unsure in her steps. I watched her father pick her up and nibble her chubby toddler thighs. I saw a woman with sun-kissed shoulders sitting in the shade. In a corner by a tree stood a tire-bruised traffic cone and I thought it’s nice that this is where it might retire. Gone are the long days on hot macadam guarding a jagged and angry pothole. I saw the sun lighting the left side of every tree – maple, oak, and birch. I have some things I might work into poems. I also re-wrote who I might be or how I might be as though my soul can only exist on the page hemmed in by the limits of soaring language that always falls short.
From the notes on my phone and to no one in particular (maybe part of an extended dating profile that won’t get written):
Let’s try to match each other’s depths. Let’s try to get better and fail often with the grace of the undeserving. I don’t know how else we might love.
I will be present and loving and difficult. On our best days, we’ll be full of magic and wonder – nothing short of the firmament above… and hopefully, on our worst and at our most petty, we’ll find the quiet compassion to forgive and the patience to wake again to new horizons soaked with yesterday’s storms and glowing in the tangerine blue break of day.
I want to say, though many things will try, together we’ll be unstoppable. But I know that isn’t true and I don’t want the exhaustion or pressure that accompanies never stopping. Let’s find a perch where we might rest our wings. Let’s drive through the night and sleep in the day-breeze that lifts the white lace curtains with smells of cities and towns and roadside markets – places we’ll learn to love and leave together.
I have a lot of days when I think I’m a pretty crummy writer – either the words won’t come or the subject doesn’t live up to my ambitions… but tonight, I felt like I saw the world the way I’d like to see the world – present and alive and full of color and sounds and movement. Regardless of whether it’s good or publishable, I was happy with the effort and pleased with the sentiment.
“And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?'” – Mary Oliver
Sometimes, if we’re quiet, or aware, or open to the experience, we might just hear that call.. and the world, or the night, or the ever-fleeting moment feels a little larger for our trying.