October 12, 2012

Friday, and a day more like early summer than fall, but still there is something in the air, in the look of things, in the light that lets you know you are being fooled.  You can't believe in summer now anymore than you can believe in spring in the middle of winter.  Oh, you know there will be a spring, but your heart does not believe it when trees are stripped bare and no one is mowing the grass.  Now, you might still believe in summer, but the air tells you that you can't hold on to it for more than its allotted days, and those days are numbered and growing shorter.  The light whispers that the season has changed even though it may do no more than whisper at the moment.

Jasmine

"Almost the twenty-first century" --

how quickly the thought will grow dated,

even quaint.

Our hopes, our future,

will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

And all our anxieties and terrors,

nights of sleeplessness,

griefs,

will appear then as they truly are --

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine.

Jane Hirschfield

It does seem dated now to think of the turn of the century, but we did at the time, speculate on what was to come and where we had come from.  I do know that anxieties and terrors seem to be easily forgotten, but created new too often.  In the drive to do the daily work, we are still surrounded by the same heady aroma of beauty the bee finds in the jasmine, and jasmine grows so prolifically, with such glorious abandon, that it seems made to throw out beauty and perfume to anyone who passes, bee or human.  It's hard to pass it by without inhaling its sweetnes, even if you would miss the flowers it's hard to miss that scent!  And so the world intrudes with its joy and its beauty, even when we are often too busy to notice.  And I am glad of it, when I hear the long rambling song of the mockingbird, or see the clouds rushing overhead making me dizzy with their white speed, or as now when each day the leaves fade from the height of summer, golding to our late fall.  I'm glad that there are so many beauties to be admired, whether we create them or they are created for us by some greater Love.

Today there has to be something that will make you smile, inhale the scent of that beauty and let it lighten up your day!