Like New

When I was a kid, like most kids, the world was very alive to me. Plants pulsed. Ducklings were so cute and furry, my heart would shake when I saw them. Rocks, even, seemed alive with their mica and quartz all glinting. Fish. Frogs. Turtles. All of it, so alive. And when spring came! The azaleas. I would walk to certain houses just to see the buds covering the bushes. East coast azaleas are large and densely packed with blooms. It was so vibrant and crazy. We did not have an azalea bush, but we did have large stands of bearded Irises. They’d come up in early spring, even when there was still morning frost. I would go outside and just stand in the front yard and stare at them. They had been planted by the developers of the neighborhood. I would wonder who the developers were and if they knew how brilliant it was to plant all those irises. The earliest bloomers, the forsythia, with their common yellow stalky blooms, even they were a thrill forming loose borders between properties, pricking the eyes with their saturatioin.

Grass was very green.

Maples were all joy. You could make those noses with the helicopter seeds.

But then, you get older, and what can happen is, everything can seem so dead. It’s not really death, it’s more like all the living things become objects in the world along with all the nonliving things. You just have to negotiate around things. The mind plays tricks, it seeks efficiency in movement and for this it can make everything seem dead.

After a hard night of birthday partying, I was sitting in a chair in my backyard and the non-fruiting decorative pear tree sprang to life. It was fabulous. I was so thrilled to feel life in the leaves. Remembering this, the life in things, makes the day so much better. It also lets you off the hook. The world is so alive. No need to control it. Let it be. Let it pulse.