Inscribing a Now

 

Today I just feel like writing.  I don’t have anything in particular to say, no specific emotion I am needing to express (that I know; or am aware of), simply a kind of quiet delight in our capacity to make language.  To fit words together, to knit our lives, to be.

Enormously unusual (I cannot stress that enough!) it is around 50 degrees and solidly overcast in Kansas this June 1^st.  Not humid even, but sprinkling now and again, the kind of precipitation you could enter and be refreshed, but a long time in getting wet.  As if the sky is asking us to take it easy, to relax, be reprieved, just enjoy.

My children are reading and practicing stringed instruments; my wife is making sounds that are delicious as she struggles with a painting; my room is dark.  These are moments of peace, are unexpected, a relief, a protection, a comforted grief.

Language is a beautiful necessity, unnecessarily.  Like bodies and voices, flowers and food.  Like mountains.  Oh, necessity can be argued for each, but what’s the point?  The world is, and that’s enough, that’s what’s important.  It seems.  And what a hinge-word!  It means we’ll never know, and that’s not the point.  Is must be different from certainty.

Perhaps I’m engaging a kingdom of “trust”?

An as-if-ness that isn’t afraid?

How little I know.

 

So the ambling to no purpose again.  “Angling” is how I heard it in my mind.  Seems it must be so.  To language in leisure must be near to the impulse of finding to-do for a bored adolescent.  Dropping a line.  Seeing what bites.  Or even just nibbles.

Sprinkling rain.  Haphazard, unpatternable, occasions.  Delight.

No expectation, desire (that’s pressing).  Just a wandering way.

It evokes a wishing-well torso for me.  So many words in the world used in anxiety, in need.  So much language and gesture, expression and sign, mobilized to “get” or “secure;” “ensure” or “relieve.”

Not that, not right now, not need.  Just rest, an in-pleasuring, a reprieve.  Just an hello or a thanks.  A “notice that?” or an “indeed.”  An agreement of person and term, an almost “natural” weave.

Sounds and sense, tones and rhythms, raindrops tickling shingles and birds.  Tires whispering snare-drum waters, puddles triangle-tinkling away.

Hello.  These are words.  It feels good to shape them – a cursive-recursive flow.  To be real (enough), here (enough), to know (enough) to inscribe.  What a pleasure, a leisure, a joy.

Thank you, world, for that hour.