Oh, it's Monday all over today, <BIG SIGH>! Trains on the way to school, not one but two of them, not late but later than I have ever been. Left my glasses in the truck and had to go out and get them after class started, no way to thread a needle or undo a knot without them. New stitch today, the peyote stitch, and the students did great, it was me who felt frazzled and out of sorts the whole morning. Came home to realize I did not know what day my eye appointment was, well, was is the operative word here, it was last Friday instead of this Thursday like I thought. So made a new appointment. Next week on Wednesday I have jury duty and couldn't find my form, good thing you can print one from the district clerk's web site.
From all of this you would think Monday would be a total washout, but . . . on my way to school I saw the widest rainbow I have ever seen! It looked like a fat striped ribbon rising straight up from the ground and disappearing into the clouds. It did not curve at all, could be it was a slide of color coming down from the heavens. I have never seen such vivid colors, and what was truly weird, it had indigo or violet on both sides of the rainbow. The other colors were in proper order from right to left but instead of starting with red it started violet, purply-blue on both sides. I was not so curious about it at the time, because I was so amazed; it had not been raining, but there were lots of clouds ahead of me and sun behind me and I got to enjoy it for a few minutes as it looked like I might drive right through it. Slowly it faded, the streak of reddish orange the last to be seen. It was such a lift to my spirits, I think because it surprised me so! I can't remember the last time I saw a rainbow but I will remember this one a long time. It was a spectacular gift complete in its own wrapping!
It's so warm you would swear it's spring except for the falling leaves. December and today we may hit 83, we started the day at our usual high temperature for this time of year, 75, and now that we have mostly sun, it will only go up from there. Hardly feels like December, maybe April just didn't want to go away this year and decided to loop around one last time.
Today I have no trouble remembering I am human . . .
You Are Human
But why not be this lake instead,
icy blue, and the little white curls
of waves, its absolute refusal
to be human? Why not be a thing?
Why not be a place
you'd go to get away
from your mother's frontal lobe eroding
as the faxed medical report has it?
Why not a lovely blue-turning-green
and why not the removal of all feeling?
Maybe she'd rather you be a lake,
a way to lie still in the world,
a melted-down pool of snow,
a place to rest.
You could let yourself wash up on foreign shores.
Or be the surface across which boats might ply their trade,
taking humans from one shore in the sun
to the other side in shade.
You remember humans, don't you?
The ones who row the boat,
who act for all the world
as if they know where they are going?
Jim Moore
Some days you would like to escape all the humanness we are heir to, surely a placid cool blue lake has things easier than humans, calmer and more remote, with great depths and a surface that responds to the wind and makes a way to cross those depths. But even all the human things that are painful are not one teaspoon to the beauty of any ordinary day. Some days we will forget that, sometimes for a long time, but once you see it again, see anything with that deep indrawing breath of wonder you will know you would not give up being human, you remember where your place is. We may not know where we are rowing to, where we are going now or in the future, but no one ever said that was a necessary thing. The idea we must know where we are going seems to make the end of the journey a goal, where I am of the opinion, however human, that it is the journey that is essential, and what we do along the way necessary. Whatever beauty we experience, whatever kindness we can do, whoever we love and by whom we are beloved, that is the rowing we are doing, and we are just going to keep doing it, and have the wonder of it all.
So, all right, it's Monday, keep rowing!
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