Contemplation

The rain brings with it a reprieve from the raking. Parker is with me on the drive home late at night, after a full shift, after women’s singing night, after, after, after. The fog is as thick as cream against the highway and the rain moves like hot wax across my windshield, never quite wiping clean. We wade through puddles in the darkness trying to walk from the car to the cabin. I build a fire and Parker heats water on the electric hot plate for a sponge bath. It’s ironic, really, the amenities each of us lacks or the other has: I without a toilet or hot water or oven/stove, Parker with a full kitchen, composting toilet, tub/shower combo, and an on-demand hot water heater; I with insulation, electricity on the grid, a phone line, Parker without insulation (3-season yurt walls), running on solar power by day and a lantern or two at night. No phone.

I’ve been watching my emotions curl in reverse. Like a train suddenly made aware of its own speed, at some point I looked out the window of my experience and wanted to slow down. This was made easier by the fact that Parker stopped coming to see me every other day – a healthy sort of backing away on his part as well. And yet, with the house finally warming up from the fire and Parker freshly clean, we climb into bed and already I want to crawl inside of him. It’s hard for him to understand, I think, the potency of this feeling when it comes over me; it is visceral.

I try not to name things, even though my daily prayer at the keyboard is an exercise in just that. I try not to imagine, even though making artful sentences of such imaginings is my practice in the page. I try not to evaluate, measure, weigh, or analyze, even though deciphering the essence of any given scene in daily life is where I find the see for new writing. The business of attraction or early love or even awkward, unnamed commitment begs for something entirely different than my day-to-day experiences. It requires a sense of adventure, of giving over and giving up, of surrender. When I am strong, I treat it like meditation in action.