I'm amongst it all—the world.
Every fat, drink-guzzling child,
Every ball-chasing dog,
Every brand-new fishing net,
Every picnic rug,
Every tattoo,
Every bad parent,
And every good parent is here.
It’s Sunday, and the first sunny day since the winter began.
The roads have emptied.
They’re silent—still.
The garish weekday flotsam has boiled to the top, and spilled out noisily into the car park.
I dodge through it, avoiding the hazards, and leave for a quiet path.
Heat is coming from the grass—at last.
It warms me as I inhale it—breath.
I’m scrutinized by overcoated, glaze-eyed sheep—they stare into my soul.
And a confused butterfly flaps around my head—wondering what I am.
Sun and mist drift back and forth—obscuring and clarifying, giving and taking away, departing and becoming.
A lycra-painted form runs past.
The material clings so tight—caressed, kissed, at one with the skin.
It is the muscle, the shape, the movement.
Sheer.
Delight oozes out.
It drowns me.
It drugs me.
It absorbs me.
I want to chase it.
I want to grab it.
Grab it, hold it, and plunge my face into it.
I imagine my breathlessness and sigh at my overcoming imagination.
And then, in an instant, something pure replaces it—something with no image.
A feeling of love comes over me—passes through me.
It’s undirected, and its cause unknown.
But it surrounds me and fills me at the same time.
I stare out from amongst it, looking for its form.
I see nothing.
Then I realise that it has no form, there is nothing to see, simply is—is simply being.
And I sense the moment of it, and of me—I sense that love and me are one.
A mysterious sense of peace.
Then another butterfly.
This one strikes my face— fluttering, changing the world in its chaotic flight
Being and being past.
Being and being elemental.
Like my footsteps, and my thoughts—every one of them altering the shape of eternity.
Forming it now—preparing it for when it arrives.
And I realise that I count—that in this confusing, delight-filled, overheated, sighing, clatter of life, I count.
Every perception I have—imaginative or sensory, unknown or loving— will, when the passage of it all finally rests, be frozen into the timeless block of it all—permanent, fixed, infinitely valuable, complete, completely loving, complete as one.
Yes, conjured up in my imagination or distilled from my senses, it is slowly coming together to create the whole.
But the world of shape, and form, and clutter snatches me from my reverie.
And the turmoil of sensation grabs me, reminds me of my temporal, temporary world.
And for a moment I'm pulled back.
I gape.
The sight of death, recorded on a monument jumps into my mind—from nowhere.
I saw it earlier, or later, and read it, or thought it, and watched its frozen epitaph with tears.
It told me that children had been killed before they could grow.
That they had been stolen from families in a holocaust of hatred—two at a time, three at a time.
Three at a time.
Whisked away as if it was worthwhile.
Their only purpose, to save another from killing them.
And the tears drop—heavy.
And I walk again because the frozen sense is too much for me.
Then a meeting—a chance in time, and bringing brightness.
A woman dying, extolling the value of it all—her life, each day, each present moment, each valuable hanging on amongst the clatter, and heat and boiling flotsam of it all.
And I understand—I understand the completeness of love, the wholeness of one, and my place within it.
Another butterfly—this time touching my hand—and I treasure my future with it.
And I realise I’m experiencing what it is to be amongst it all—all of it, this perfect final moment.
The eternal world no longer in time.
