TAKING A WALK THROUGH DIFFERENT LANDSCAPES
DAY 7
From Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God:
“The deep orange-gold of the sun is pure nostalgia. An antique radiance already sheds itself upon this beautiful life we share. I grow heavy, rooted in my lawn chair. Everything I say and everything my parents say, the drift of friends, the tang of lemonade, the wine on their tongues, the cries of sleepy birds and the squirrels launching themselves…all of this is terminal. There will never be another August on earth, not like this one”
Blessed gifts of time:
Flow, change and mortality
An active physical and mental engagement with the world
A readiness to respond to circumstance
The awe and wonder of the child’s gaze indeed.
Walking in the rain, singing.
A glistening sidewalk. Rain dropping wetness and discomfort. An empty space. Walking and singing, non plussed by the storm, enjoying a newly-gained sense of freedom and the cleared-up space. Feeling of joy, like a child at play in the newly discovered snow. Seeing the place as familiar and yet experiencing it for the first time. Its texture, its surface, its urban beauty. Without the crowd, moveable or not. But with the feast.
Many years later, on the Brittany coast
Beautiful sunset. Generous nature.
The sky, the sea. A giant tea party in red.
Scuttling of the clouds. Scudding across the distance.
Scribbling on the beach. Tiny birds scurrying the surface of the sand. Calling out
To retrieve what was written and has been lost
To the tide coming in, to the occasional longer wave, to human erasure.
Every second bringing change
Experiential and empirical.
The urgency of time.
Drinking the instant like water.
Clinging to every moment:
Existe et meurs avant de mourir