Where Fireflies Blinked the Night Before

Allowing the storm to come through the bedroom window is an act of possible clarity. All night rain shushes, and all night diluted dreams float in and away from conscious horizons. Dawn, shorn of speech, breaks through and the whole world feels humid and birdless and muted. I return to coffee after months without. My stomach recoils.

Lately, attention lent to how one might articulate without a voice. In a field of daisies, what flows and to whom? I might glean a coolness from running my fingers over dampened petals, but the plant stands rooted and unimpressed. Yet which one of us is free? The daisy is not separated by conceptualizing – it perceives light, it responds with growth, unweighted by ideals or the interface of “what does it all mean.” Information about the Other gathers in a paralytic way. Yet I read on.

Sun dapples the pine where fireflies blinked the night before. The neighbor whistles for his once-rescued-squirrel every morning using a black-capped chickadee call. Am I endeared or duped?

Lately, a pull north to the Upper Peninsula. It's not the desire to travel or a feeling of unease in home places that nags. It is more about listening to inaudible voices, the language of unspoiled vibrations. Who would go with me? There is always that.

We spent the week visiting college campuses and honestly, if the daughter decided to reject that racket I'd consider her education complete. A shower. A drink. A slump into sleep. I'm tired of seeing it all.

Zen proverb: let go or be dragged. That'll do.

M started with pigs but they all died, explaining that they were taken from the mother too soon. She patted the belly of the new, bigger pigs, telling me their names and that they'll be used for meat. I am not a farmer or a farm pretender or farm novice. Those in my care cannot go to slaughter, says the one nestled in suburbia, tending landscapes and hanging baskets and getting food from the superstore. What do you make of all of that?

I spend the day in the back corner of the property, pulling and digging and clearing vines. An old wagon wheel rimmed in wrought iron comes to the surface and a thick green extension chord plugged into nothing. I dig and scrape until my back no longer helps me rise. Working to work. Otherwise, I would sit all day to write about pine trees and Gun Lake and the groundhog who lives under my deck.

Weekend, I love you – Independence Day, not so much.