It started out just as Yeats had said. It was about work and the grind and the difficulties and the schedule and the lack of freedom and everything that doesn’t feel like anything you want with the exception of the paycheck. If you’ve been there and done that, then this could be your signature song too.
Or it could be as Yeats said, that the argument with yourself is poetry and the one with others is rhetoric. Let’s leave rhetoric to the dailies, the nine to fives and fill in the dreamtime with the soulful work of finding what it is that pulls at you. And then follow it. If only, right? But sometimes you are captured by a tide, as I was, and you move with it as it remembers for you until you catch on.
Summer jumped in on the day and got into my skin. That must have been what propelled me through another ring of time into the past when it wasn’t only a good idea to start dinner with dessert but something you did without any inner hassling. Just when it dawned on me to go for a swim past five, my brain noodled some more time. Didn’t have me catch a catfish but caught the cool breeze and decided to have a sundae on Saturday instead of a swim. The drive to DQ brought all the sights and sounds of summer folks on the beach and those moving between the boards and Ocean Avenue. It is the air, it is the haze, the dampness, the smells, but it’s also all that movement that tells you summer is happening now.
After dessert, it seemed only natural to check on the eagles and see if there were any babies. It’s the first time I brought the spotting scope by myself. I also took the new camera, which weighed less, then a roll of film. It was starting to feel like an adventure. I had to struggle with the call to chores and projects. Time off is the catch basin where I hope to get a huge jump on my own work. Fortunately, I couldn’t ignore what was calling me. All the while this felt like being in the flow there was the awareness that this feeling was something that I rarely followed.
Now that the current is known the way there should be easier to travel. It bends to the right and right again until you’re at the wetlands. I went alone but it didn’t feel that way when I got there. Never saw the eagles. The red wings were calling back and forth. The tide was out. The mud flats were wide and marked with new reed plugs – it looked like the business side of a needlepoint. The sun was going down. Every moment the colors were sweeter, the blues deeper. The spaces between the reeds and cattails grew darker.
I know the way now.
by freda karpf