Something drops hard in my stomach. It almost keeps me from eating another bite, so I simply sit with it. Wait till the feeling passes before anything else may begin.
It saps me. As if a knot in my stomach pulled loose, a thread is unraveling at my feet.
Had I sewn it? I’m pondering the question as my intestines plop onto the floor. I fade in front of you – speechless for once. My eyes tell you I’m as baffled as you are …
So now, I wait. Let it pass. Because it will.
Question.
Who am I thinking of? And it’s you. It’s always you. Well, almost anyway. Often enough.
I message. Simple – knowing you have a whole world, apart from me, to manage without my distraction. To know to do good, even with a simple message, I think… So, I do. With care.
You message back. It’s instantaneous. We were both on the other’s mind perhaps…
Still, it didn’t need to be true. I know how often it’s been the case in the past – when I’ve been thinking of you, and your light arrives in my atmosphere at the same time.
Serendipity smiles.
I smile, too. I’m entranced. I know how lightning strikes like this for us. How it can… I yearn for you to sweep me back up in it.
Still… there’s so much to do. So little time left…
Just now, something buzzes against my ear. As I sit on the porch swing, writing these words, I wonder if it might be a bee. It was too quick to identify.
I think of my bee-keeping grandfather’s scruffy beard against my chin and grin. The family grin – the one that goes too high above the gumline and squints the eyes into narrow, horizontal lines. The one that snuffs in chuffs out the nostrils.
Turn, turn.
Smiling eyes turn more thoughtful. I’m thinking of that buzz. Something’s off. It sends toll bells ringing, replaying like a broken record.
Warning.
This grumbling seemed low and hostile. There and gone before I could register it. My attention was not on the world around me, yet again…
The black wings of a wasp flash in my thoughts. The smile drains away. I lean forward, inch my head to one side and then to the other … to gain better perspective, my dear. Slow and steady. I’m a parable-wrapped ‘bear tale.’
‘Bear tales,’ as my grandmother used to say. I see her in the garden. She’s swatting something out of her eyes, but she’s doing it with the sweeping of her hand.
I don’t want to swat away haphazardly either, killing a honeybee or hurting something that doesn’t want to harm me.
However, it’s silent now.
I wait.
Cautious.
Rumbling to my left, I see him… or her. It’s a kind of waspy thing, just as I thought. Looking for a foot-hold somewhere, I imagine, – surviving just like the rest of us.
But it can do harm. And will, I think it somberly. There’s something sad in it now. A new burden for which to be mindful – a kind of ‘do no harm.’
I don’t want to kill it. I’d rather wait and watch.
Eventually, it moves on. The exhale comes, but there is a rattling growing underneath the relief. A muttering builds, rationalizing why I was fully within my right to protect. From what, though?
Something rushes over me – how it begins there.
Small.
A wind chime from someone else’s porch carries down to me here in the hollow.
Sometimes, it smacks us in the face. Other times, the wind builds from places we cannot see. I’m reflecting on this when a butterfly coasts down and crosses the yard in front of me.
I watch the wind-waves rippling the grass, gliding across the yard and fluttering the mountain laurel leaves across the creek. The butterfly finds its way through and goes somewhere out of sight. Someplace higher. And I find myself filled with gratitude once more for the small things.
Because sometimes it has to begin there.
Small.