Noticing

I feel the pressure of accepting coffee cake because the barista is enthused about it. And so it begins.

I want a day without pressure. I want a day that is kept at bay. But how? How do you keep the blur of it from flooding your early morning and washing away a delicate form in the snow, the alive sharpness of frost in air, the dark trail of wood grain in an empty chair, or the familiar smell of espresso? How do you release yourself and become intimate with a moment?

The right song can wrap you in its arms and stop time. Also, a black and white photograph of an empty street, perhaps in Mexico, save for a bicycle, sews up a second. Too, the red sweatered back of a reader and her book and coffee, and above her the play of neon light on a window across the avenue. And now the mocha voice of Ray Charles in Georgia, slows the blur. A second of swagger here would break the rhythm but there is none from Ray, not on Georgia.

But then, I suppose, it’s not time stopped in its tracks that we crave. It is rhythm. Because rhythm is the willing handmaiden of awareness. And noticing is living.

It is possible that the big reason we have been dropped into this world is to simply notice it, notice it in all its radiance; and to be mindful of all its creatures, in all their broken glory.