Sunlight

When I read Brent Staples’ City Life editorial (“A Little More Sunlight”) in the NY Times yesterday, I was in it from the first sentence: “A tree trunk shattering in the wind can sound very much like a lightning strike.” I’d been thinking of the meandering paths minds take through history, through a day, every spark and eruption mine had had since my first sip of coffee. He wrote how the wind had accomplished in a few seconds what he’s been trying to accomplish in his garden plot for 10 years. I almost laughed out loud. The attention they paid to damp, shaded life, the nurturing of roots, the patches of light – how profoundly intimate and scrabbling such tending is.

I am listening to the birds in this springtime thrust, and thinking of earth. As I mentioned to a friend recently, this deep sense I feel of “coming home” is new to me. Maturation, times spent on Earth and a sense of it, is a part, and each spreading ripple of thought I feel from my beginnings, our beginnings, the clouds as thoughts. I will forever be a “tender of select things” – my neglect of others is simply an admonishment, a reminder, of all there is to celebrate. The leaves I see moving in the breeze, the quick flash of yellow which disappears, the way one inked word winks at me from a page, such as “Sunlight.” Happy scented spring.