After the wind storm I came downstairs and looked outside. The stars were out, the moon the shape of a hook, it seemed like it was just full. I lit some candles and made coffee. All this going back to Scotland, leading up to our next trip, it had been two years. The brown field by the school driving in to work, how it looked the way I felt, “overcome.” You can personify scenes like that, give them human qualities, but I think the landscape, how you’re feeling, isn’t separate at all, doesn’t need any feelings assigned, it’s just what you notice. But it’s hard to avoid getting down, this time of year. The sideways rain of November, the unusually dark pallor of 3 o’clock. How fast the stars get swallowed up and the moon with it too, only the outline of the trees. I’d go to the lake, through the streetlamp light, down to the rocks along the shore, the pebbles and drain rock where the rain water channels down, a spot where the ducks come in the morning, then sound cranky when I get there, and leave. The coffee maker makes a sound, there’s only that and the clock. The early morning dark allows for the web-like peace of dreams before we’re overcome by the distractions of the day. Even now they wait in the doorway asking to be fed, they crowd around me when all I want to do is dream, to not be bothered by false reminders of the now. There is another now that’s far away, inside, an imagined place where we can be what we dreamed we were before we realized we were just dreaming.

Image, ‘Girl Eating an Apple,’ Godfried Schalken, 1675-80

Categories: musings, prose

Tags: being present, living in the now, mindfulness, nature imagery, pacific northwest, prose, stream of conscious, stream-of-consciousness, William Pearse writer