For
the first time since I quit teaching I’ve been feeling retired, and it’s a
wonderful feeling. What do I mean by it? A dream defined it for me last night.
I am sitting outside a house with a water
bottle and a book, and it’s time to go take an exam. The people in the house
are concerned – it is a difficult exam and you haven’t studied for it! I smile
and say to them, I don’t care. I have such a good life! In my mind I know I’m
going to flunk it and that is perfectly okay with me!
I
used to worry a bit about how to spend time when I have day in and day out to
myself, without a project (but I always have one) that I am obsessing about and
all entangled with. I simple adore this sprawl of objectless time, and I move
from thing to thing in an easy and unstressed way, figuring out small steps to
take – now I’m going to sit down at the desk and journal; there is always the
book I am reading, THE HISTORY AND POWER OF WRITING; I will cook something, or
eat something. Life feels so extraordinarily simple.
Want
to record an evening P and I had a week ago after we had both been indoors the
whole day. We though we’d walk into town on the cliffs, sit at Sea Grove for a
bit, get the mail, and walk back. I hadn’t bathed or even brushed my teeth, so
I did these, and wore my new magenta jeans I had bought at Macy’s because they
fit me so well (by which I mean comfortable), was delighted to see it matched
my magenta down jacket, put on some lipstick, eye liner, earrings, and off we
went. On the way back my appetite surged and I said, let’s stop somewhere and
eat. He didn’t want to, and certainly didn’t want to eat meat, which I craved,
so we passed many restaurants and I was getting more and more annoyed with him
till we talked into Zel’s. It was still happy hour, so we sat outside by the
fire and ordered pork sliders, a hamburger and a glass of stout. The sky was a
deep, glowing indigo Safire still edged at the horizon with a faint yellow and
drinking our stout and splitting the hamburger I had the time of my life. How
simple, how marvelously delightful!
Lucky us...watching the sapphire sky fade to the dark blue....more real than real when we stop and have fun....pull ourselves out of the constant doing with our work that Saraswati (Indian goddess of the arts) demands of us. It is our daily puja/prayer....more gratitude that this Gift comes in and Gift goes out!
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