Water Lily
From the water’s depths
An offering to the sun
Wrapped in petals white
A week’s worth of time spent quietly, not on the grand, spectacular or breathtaking, but on easy going, on flowing down the path of least resistance over a small pile of days.
An afternoon of knitting with a friend, littered with purls and butterflies, as full of chuckles as a rivulet finding its way through a clutter of rocks
I am doing a hat meditation for a friend. Meditation wants accoutrements — candles, incense, a rosary or singing bowl. It wants location, a quiet place set apart from interruption. Meditation wants a point of focus — a word, a verse, a formula, some sort of mental coat hook on which to neatly hang one’s busy thoughts out of the way, to make room for meditation to occur. The accoutrements for a hat meditation are knitting needles, a ball of yarn, a bowl to put the yarn in, a cable needle. The quiet place is a comfortable chair and ottoman curtained off by soft music. The point of focus is the knitting pattern. And in the quiet meditation of knits and purls and cable crosses, memories of thirty years of our friendship drift quietly through the still waters like particolored koi slipping slowly through the dappled shadows underneath the lily pads, and now and again they undulate through open water where the sunlight sparkle on their scales. In the meditation of the hat, happy thoughts and blessings become tangled in the yarn, and slip into the weaving of the knits and purls and cable crosses of this hat that will go with a friend on a new journey to a new place, a new life.
And the zen of it is this: Intention effects outcome.
One does what one can.
How wonderfully those great blue-grey heron wings row upward over the air, in careful strokes; yet even so, a smoke-grey wingtip lowering upon the outstroke might brush so gently against the heart and leave a tickle of wonder behind, as it rows away across the still blue waters of the sky.
Three slices of cheese and 18 crackers. (Too bad that phrase doesn’t scan any better than that else it would make a great first line for the chorus of a country song.) Two slices of Sargento muenster cheese and a slice of Sargento sharp cheddar cheese and 18 Keebler Town House sea salt flavor Flatbread Crisp crackers. The cheese is cut into equal thirds lengthwise and the thirds cut into equal haves. A predictable taste – one sixth of a slice of cheese laid atop one cracker. A known taste. No surprises. My wallpaper program shows a photograph of white water rapids down a narrow canyon with steep, perpendicular walls. That is how my life is right now. Focus narrowed onto doing what is next, putting one foot in front of the other, getting through the tricky bit that lies just ahead. Sufficient unto the day . . .
At the stop sign by the playa lake I see the long hot days have sucked the shallow end bare-dirt dry. The white duck and his speckled lady have twice as far to lockstep steeply down to the stainless-steel dull water. A zipper of gulls ride the basket rim of the scuttled shopping cart uncovered by the sinking of the lake.At the point on the brink where “go” and “stay” are balanced, where the rope is in your hands and the water sparkles below, you wonder if it is such a good idea to swing out over the water, let go of the rope, fall. The success of others is no guarantee. And yet, and yet. . .you grasp the rope tightly, push off with your feet, swing out, let go. The cold water slaps against your body. As you bubble to the surface, you think, ‘For a moment I was flying!”
Posted in Flight imagery, Sensation, Summer, Water
Tagged Feelings, Flying, Summertime, Swimming
Wol's River of Stones 