Peek…Peek…Peek
By the inimitable Brian Banks.
Some days God made best for rest. After a long weekend around people, there is a window through which you have seen yellow and black swallowtails, through which you have seen a brown nuthatch fly sideways, through which you have heard the song of a mockingbird.
From inside, it's hard to believe it's 94 degrees, almost six in the evening. You want to wait and watch and see. You wonder whether the frogs can communicate with the compositions of Bach in the same manner as they did with Rachmaninoff.
There is a difference between inside and outside.
There is a difference between morning and night. The way leaves droop in the evening when the plant is still in a pot. The way the spots of bare ground turn hard and, if the rain doesn’t come soon, will crack like the back of your heels, will crack like the concrete you paid a guy round the corner to lay on a long ago Sunday. You do not need to rush for what you cannot see reaches further beneath the surface to pull up water and life. And what cannot reach dies and feeds the rest.
You consider wishing you had planted moringa all along the southside of your house. You consider taking a peek to see what has happened to the papaya you planted days before. This is the way the mind is, calculating, always in need of improving, always ready to do. This mind can be used for there is a sweet spot that takes stage in the depths of silence, that says, “Hey, I’m Presence, remember me?”
And Presence guides you. Presence will take your hands, will take what is in pots, will clear the south side sidewalk so that longan seeds you once shared with Nasim might move from the pots where they became seedlings and sit beneath the shade of the rising papayas. Presence says that a baby needs a mother.
Looks like a lone blue jay appreciates Bach, stopping for a listen in the angled branch of the starfruit tree. The jay does not stay long. Why would he? Jays seem like more of a Wagner bird, like the helicopters roaring over the jungles of Vietnam in Apocolypse Now.
Without even considering, I called that jay a him, probably because I have seen those bastards tear apart nests and chase other birds from feeders. They are the Andrew Dice Clays of the avian world.
The other day I saw a gang of sparrows flit and flutter between back door and nearby mulberry tree protecting each other. A couple would sit on the concrete angel into which I had placed birdseed and there was a lone blue jay sad in demeanor, alone on the back steps waiting for whatever seeds fell from the angel’s raised hands.
There is no metaphor in this, not intended anyway, but surely you might find something. There was simply me, for the first time, feeling sorry for that particular creature, and then again, I guess every jay has his day, and even the sun shines on the steps some days.
And a final thought, from the Nepalese, how that original saying, meant about dogs, comes from the Hindus worshipping so many gods, so that there is even a day when Dog becomes God, making life very difficult for dyslexic agnostics.
