My baby girl lost her front tooth, and I feel like I've always wanted a little girl with this smile.
We are okay. I've been wound too tightly to write. But we are okay.
I remember that there were sunny days in March of last year. We fanned ourselves with our hands and laughed and pretended to complain about the heat. I believe that could happen again.
I believe in our little rented beach house, still standing, at the edge of the world. I believe that June will come. I believe that, if it were summer, these illnesses and things wouldn't worry me so. These illnesses and things wouldn't rattle me until my teeth are chipped.
We're taking care of each other. I've been meditating at a center in the city. I've been forgetting to eat. I've been doing something like praying, quietly begging against the vastness. I've been trying to open my heart to the space in everything. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, all containing hundred of billions of suns, in the universe. One of Jupiter's moons has an atmosphere similar to Earth's atmosphere. Methane flows there, like water. Observing it is like observing the earth, billions of years ago. I've been trying to grasp the tiny enormity of being a human being.
I've always felt something like this, but I thought it was just me, just how I am. I've always felt like everything and nothing. Like a wonder of hydrogen and evolution and also, just an infinitesimal speck on a glowing blue pinprick, lost in an unending and frozen sea of darkness. I've always felt like the most beautiful thing alive, and also like a complete meaningless failure. I'm coming to see that this is just what it feels like to be alive. We spend so much time trying to define ourselves, trying to stand out, to be ourselves... only to realize, over and over, that we're not really separate from anything. We're all made from the same 12 particles of matter, even the stars, even Jupiter's moons. Even the ocean and the air. We're all going to die.
For now, I'll wake up next to a sweet little girl with a missing front tooth, and know the face of God.
February gets me every time, too. Where I live it gets really gray. Really gray. The snow is often melted or refrozen into hard nasty dirty low mounds. Everyone puts their heads down, there are no flowers.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Tom wrote this song about it:
http://www.myspace.com/tomcatmull/music/songs/dirty-valley-low-70956815
I so completely feel this, especially praying into the vastness. I too have been trying to pray, even though I feel little connection to what I'm praying to. But, somehow, I feel better, just putting it out there, hoping it's heard.
ReplyDeleteHere in AZ it's April. April is the cruelest month. She reminds me that the heat is coming and it's not going to end for six months or so.
ReplyDeleteI wish you could come here now. You would be happy here in Feb. It's bright and sunny, but jacket weather.
Such a gorgeous smile. The part of enormity that gets me is the invisible something that must be big at the edges of our universe that is sucking planets towards it. Is it an abutting universe? A black hole of gigantic proportions? If space goes on forever, then how does the concept of 'outside' even exist. Is it possible for there to be something without edges that contains objects with edges? Or do we have edges because everything has edges, and if that's the case, what's beyond space, holding it, and what's on the other side of that?
ReplyDeleteYour writing is just so beautiful.
ReplyDelete