Walking in place. Saturday Morning.

~ Live & Learn

“I like things I can see as much as things I can’t (see)…that inner light was drawing me in.”

It was an innocuous line by Murakami in Killing Commendatore, but for some reason I couldn’t, I can’t, let it go.

And then it’s Baader-Meinhof. You are shopping for a new car, you fall in love with a particular model, and then suddenly you begin to see it everywhere. But the what is what I can’t see.

Murakami is followed by a passage I read by Immanuel Kant:

“Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.”

And it’s early Saturday morning.  Light rain.

I’m in bed, it’s dark out. The body is spent from the week. The Mind is off on its own, its finger tips touching, exploring, wandering, free, weightless.

The window is cracked open. Rain falls softly, landing on the flat side of leaves, droplets snailing down ever so gently.  Somewhere in the distance, a Semi rolls down I-95, light rain is wiped from his windshield with the beat of their flap-flap. He’s racing to beat morning traffic into Manhattan, so he can continue deadheading home to Tennessee to see his wife and children, and sleep in his own bed.

Overhead, thousands of feet up, the rain taps on the hull of a Boeing 737 on its way Westward. Everyone is asleep but for a solitary passenger, his overhead light on, reading a page turner by James Patterson.

A green potted plant, on the window sill in the bathroom, sips moisture from the humidity that fills the room.

The newspaper delivery man (no longer a boy on a bike) rubs the sleep from his eyes. He slides one blue plastic bag on after another and tosses the papers into the front seat of his car. The paper lands with a thump on our driveway, and he carries on. The rain drops plop on this double-bagged newspaper, which sits waiting on our driveway, dry, resting.

And then the Earth, absorbing the morning rain, emits a rich, deep smell that fills the room. The immensity of an attempt, my attempt, to describe it, a failure, yet this triggers a passage from Claire Fuller’s new book Bitter Orange:

Soon one of these sleeps will be my last. I will never again gaze up through the branches of a tree to see light moving between the leaves, never press hard against the bark until its pattern is imprinted on my skin. I will never again smell earth after rain, never hear the sound of water lapping against stone…

And finally, the Mind fingers one last verse, this one from Milosz: How softly it rains / On the roofs of the city / How perfect / All things are.

And with this, the Mind pauses to rest, the light rain ceases rippling its surface, and then it comes. Aha! You ain’t no Murakami or Kant, but, you got it!

I close my eyes smiling, and the rain continues to tap.  The Mind now, Quiet.

Aha, How perfect / All things are.

And I sleep.

Photo: Marta Navarro with View on Black (in Light Rain)

49 thoughts on “Walking in place. Saturday Morning.”

    1. It should be on your list.

      “I believed it would be exciting not to know where I would go or what I would do next for the first time in thirty-nine years. We had a routine, Mother and I, which never varied, and I had imagined that being able to eat when I wanted, go to bed when I wanted, do anything I wanted, would make me free. I believed I would be transformed. I’d been preparing for Mother’s death for ten years—every time I came home from the shops or the library, I unlocked the front door uncertain of what I would find. After she was gone, I was ready to leave too. I wanted to be rid of the memories of those years which were soaked into every surface: the chair she monitored the road from while waiting for me to return, the desk where she sat to write her regular letters to my father asking for more money, the bed where I nursed her and where she’d died—which, when I stripped the sheets, smelled of her and made me cry.”

      ~ Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange (Tin House Books, October 9, 2018)

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    2. Ray; Hero Husband just described ACURATELY the meaning of this word in every sense…. I had no idea and my trusted Leo.org didn’t know the term at all (leo.org is for German/every other language translations)
      BRAVO and thank you for this enlightening and profound comment!

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      1. I like to look up words using the Merriam-Webster dictionary because they have an audio file to hear the pronunciation of said word, as well…for me when I hear the word and read the meaning, the immersion is sometimes helpful…

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  6. This is nearly an overkill of BEAUTY, serendipity, too good to cede to, to drown in, to bath and swim in – exactly the type of reading this woman is coming from far away to grab, to eat and digest… And then you really kill me with the two Claire Fuller’s quotes in Bitter Orange – Man, when I read the first one in the side-bar of another blog my thought was: This would be a perfect (and unfeasible) text for the obituary notice for my mum…. Except then, in the comments, you added an even more poignant text of hers! Gosh, I can’t even!!!! (whatever!)
    But dear friend, PLEASE add Claire Fuller’s name to the tags too…. I shall certainly search for her again in your posts!
    The whole compo is an ode to the rain, the feelings, the sadness but also the refreshing effect, and here it’s still not raining. I’m constantly travelling between France and Switzerland and it seems that in both places there was a short and highly appreciated bit of rain only I wasn’t at the right place and at the right time! But I nearly fell asleep reading this gorgeous text so your mission is accomplished to a very high standard!

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    1. Moved! Thank you Kiki. Appreciate it so much. Here’s another for you:

      “When he sees I’m awake he takes my hand, and I’m surprised to find that it is a comfort: a hand in mine. I can’t remember when I was last touched—not the quick wash-over with a warm cloth, or the flick of a comb through my hair, these don’t count. I mean properly touched, held by someone.”

      – Claire Fuller, Bitter Orange (Tin House Books, October 9, 2018)

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    2. She has written two other fantastic novels (Bitter Orange arrived in the mail this week) “Our Endless Numbered Days” and “Swimming Lessons”. I highly recommend those as well…

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  7. Blimey, bring them on, all of them – Murakami, Fuller, and all the others! I’m thirsty for this kind of exchange… 😉 (less hot for Kant but you can’t love them all, can you?!)

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  8. Pingback: Walking in place. Saturday Morning. – Bright, shiny objects!

  9. This is so beautiful one car read it over and over…
    I’ve been in montréal for a week, it hasn’t stopped raining. And when ever I’m here I always think of how close Mary Oliver is where she resides and wonder what she’s dreaming of. And you too. Thank you for sharing!

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  10. At a certain age we all have that thought about one of these days not waking up and not having the pleasure of all the things that we don’t appreciate enough while we’re alive. A good reminder to pay attention now. I like how you wrote about letting go of all those things that our mind struggles with when we can’t sleep. Once things are put in their place (in our mind) we can rest more easily.

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  12. The individual thoughts and to some degree the cultural and collective impact of beauty interpreted is being lost in the awareness, awe struck in the midst of a miracle…

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  13. At your close…I think of you and those of us who have the security and warmth of a bed, a full belly and contentment in life and those who do not../// and I think of people who lived near the Atacama desert in Chile who have perhaps have lived their entire life without ever, seeing, feeling, tasting on the tip of tongue the wet, coolness of a transparent rain drop…/// and I think of a person perhaps a child who for the first time experiences the sound of rain after they’ve had a cochlear implant…oh, the Wonder of Life

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  14. I love how you don’t just read a book/article/story… you share snippets and quotes. Do you highlight the passages in the books? Do you leave bookmarks? Do you immediately copy down that phrase that so touches you?

    And thank you. For being you.

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    1. Awww, thank you Dale. I do highlight passages in my Kindle and typically save the ones that leave a mark on me in my Evernote app and label them with tags to assist with searching. And often times the mind calls up bunches of related passages that I need to go find.

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