Spheres of Wonder

Rain in ever-opening spheres, continuous circles fanning the pavement. Fluid ground, now, not concrete. As if it’s ever solid underneath. As if gravity is up and down and not all around.

I’m peering out an old garage door, panels turned to glass. Outside green, slides in my field, side by side by side. Even though I’m at a table, sitting on a bench, the dark wood, dark and perfect coffee house counter straight in front of me, I’m also sitting in an old garage. It’s coming to me slowly. It’s a great café, too, upstairs. Yes, and it was once a house where people lived.

This is why I leave my house to write. I can’t go to other continents in the hour given, but the thrill is there. As if.

That’s always how I set out. Pilgrimage, you know. Big on that. Always feels like it to me, down the block or across the river, or after a thirty hour flight. If it doesn’t feel this way, aw, painful. Really. I can’t walk into a Starbuck’s without a weird twitch in my leg. Run!

It’s Paris this morning (aka Hillsdale). I write a few words. Pause to reflect upon the sheen of roasted potatoes on my plate, on the bench beside me. Laptop on the table. Contemplating texture for dragged out seconds, pepper flecks lightly adorn quartered wedges, and I taste – I want to say pumpkin? But that’s not it. Joy, though, just staying with sensation on buds. Taste buds to brain, and balancing the plate on my lap now, I turn to write again.

The man who sits beside me holds a magnifying glass directly in front of his eyes, lifts a stapled article, brain research, and reads. At the table next to him on the other side, slides of teeth, x-rays, charts and notes. A couple huddled in discourse. This is why I leave home to write.

I want to join that field. Aromas that I don’t know until now, associations I wouldn’t have made, but do, and beside people, the warmth of bodies and the beautiful strangeness of proximity.