Sacrosanct is how I felt sitting in the park, thinking. This is a crime against wisdom, I would realize between thoughts, and with this sharpeness of realization piercing the cocoon of my own creation the space would rush into my mind with all the cleansing solace of pure listening.
Breath filled my ears and my eyes softened, seeing less, and as I saw less I heard more. The thinly wailing sirens that I didn’t know I had been blocking rose then faded so beautifully that I smiled, making my own sin curve to match the one I heard. Looking up and away from the people I had been watching, the trees took on a new density. The winds danced the leaves of some branches more than others and now immersed in reading their messages, I could no longer hear the conversations of the people walking by in twos, threes, families, friends and their phones. When I did look to see them again, their world felt far, foreign.
It lasted only a moment, though, that high definition listening, stopping the world that was and was not mine. Auditory arrival is what I called it, when the feeling arose. And as soon as I named it, it was done and gone, some sober and spontaneous psychedelic phenomenon, and I was plunged back into my too familiar deluge of inner life. I much preferred the other way and yet, like wave after wave keeping me in my places came the questions of what time is it and when will I eat and what was the last thing I said before he left me single and broken and oh look at this couple taking selfies together is it romantic or terrible and surely not as terrible as the screaming adolescents swaggering by with their pants so low, far too low, too confident in their numbers and hormones so I guess school’s out for the afternoon and we could call that insanity freedom but good lord this whipping noise bothering my whole being why would a helicopter be flying so low right here?
Only then do I remember, in some last-night’s-dream sort of faded sense, that I am here. Here in this place singing with wind in leaves and my hair moving quietly, every so gently imitating the movements above me, all of us living things in subtle obeyance to the infinite and invisible and incomprehensibly vast.
When I stand up to go back to the train, I hear my feet roll through the soft silence afforded by grass. Just a moment, and then the pavement again, rough and unnatural and hard to my feet but so well known that I like it.
Leave a Reply