All the Birds of This Day

Tonight Carl took me out with two circles of paper in his hand.  They were a star clock, a basic, obvious principle that I had for some reason, never thought of, never even imagined.  He held it up to the big dipper, then casiopia, then lined it up with the north star.  He said it should be 11:30, it was 11:20, but close enough considering that thousands of years ago when the stars were actually used to tell time, ten minutes wasn't then what it is to us now.  It probably didn't matter much.  As we were out on the street in front of my house, I looked up at the stars, and realized that I had been driving under them for nights now, without staring up, without even opening my sunroof.  I realized that they were actually twinkling.  

I thought about how it was 11:30 p.m. and my dad was still at work.  That's been normal before. I try to leave a note goodnight on the kitchen counter, but tonight when I really thought about it, the idea seemed so much more than I had remembered.  My dad was working that late for nothing more than the fact that he loves us and wants us to have what we need.  A simple concept, but all of a sudden, that love seemed tangible.  It seemed simple, like the twinkling stars I'd failed to notice, but still perhaps a miracle.

And as I go further back in the day, I think to the hours before that, when Kate and I made a beautiful and natural salad out of wheat berries, spinach, roasted pine nuts and a lemon vinagarette.  I realized then as well that I was eating food, I was preparing food that had been grown somewhere out of the earth, it had either grown up through soil, or come down from a tree branch.  I had forgotten.  

All of this made me remember a moment, just a brief moment that happened to me a few weeks ago.  I was having a particularly difficult day of things.  I was driving in the car in a busy place screaming of modern metropolis, I believe I was crying at being lost and feeling incapable.  I was trying to navigate my way around the busy intersections in a car that is always threatening combustion, nothing seemed pretty outside.  A thought came to my head that went something like this,  'It's okay if everything here seems foreign.  This is not your home, you have not always been here, and you will not always be here, of course it is hard sometimes.'  I've kept that thought tucked away in the folds of my heart in the weeks since, it has somehow calmed me in many ways.  It has reminded me that the passage of time is so short, that we will someday see again the friends we've lost, that material things will never create a home, people do.  I've been seeing the world again today.