What Can I Do?
We’re out and about early with the dog these days. Sunlight usually glimmers way up above a city that hasn’t quite woken up yet. The water in the fountain sits, still and serene. The restaurants and shops are silent. I’m a hunter of silence. Of the moments when the regularly structured business of the day dissolves, if you’re tuned in. The light moves in patterns on the wall and the flowers breathe next to the offerings on the shrine.
Sitting inside such moments of silence, I come blindly toward a vague inkling of how we fabricate the dreams of our experience; moving at just about a million miles an hour. And of how, when we take the time to open the curtains and step outside of the walls of our own house, life is often far more straightforward than it seems. I make an aspiration for the presence of that elusively gentle simplicity as the structures reappear and the dream gathers pace once again.
The old American urge to take to the road has re-emerged for us recently. It’s a feeling we’ve met from time to time in the past decade and once again the insistent yearning for vast open spaces and new skies has arisen. We’ve sat together, parents and children and drawn the shapes of some adventures. With the decision to bring our children’s schooling back home and a husband untethered from his office we are suddenly mobile and ready to explore once again.
For the moment we continue to move within the dimensions of our newly adjusted Californian life. The highly structured week of home teaching and activities slows its tempo gracefully enough through the weekend to enjoy the swift drive down the freeway to our favourite endless stretch of blue, sea and sky; a treat we never grow tired of. Sunday afternoons are freed into open space and on a day like yesterday, with a vast clear sky and gently rolling ocean, you can suddenly find yourself wrapped in one of those moments of silence.
Otherwise I'm continually reminded of the importance of the personal, the intimate and the local. In the midst of all the devastation and hardship arising and that still to emerge it seems that we're being offered a precious opportunity to treat each other with kindness and love. As institutions or structures falter, barriers, whether real or imagined, simply melt away. If we choose to do so, we really can turn around to ask one another- what can I do for you?
Image courtesy of Ed Heckerman
