Operatic trilling? Amplified gargle? That bird’s intention is to be flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal keeping up with Claude Bolling’s jazz on piano. My dreaming melts into the pillow and soon I’m upright wondering at this bird voice steering me away from tea and e-mail, shower and chore. That bird insists I put footsteps on the planet, until I match its burst of heart with my own ambulatory joy in being.
I am not a regular at Buffalo Park. Where people do laps so earnestly I feel left out with my poet’s pace. But nudged by a bird that got me out of bed I briskly walk up past the skating rink through a disc golf course onto an edge of meadow where I can sit with my back against a tree. There I consider dog walkers, disc flingers, joggers and mountain bikers as they sweat at a distance.
Is it spring in my blood? Today love transforms my seeing. A dog dancing at the end of a leash looks like the dog owner’s heart wishing to explore without reserve. The disc floating away from the hand that threw it is a full heart launched into both purposeful path and delightful float. Those knees pumping the cyclist along a dirt loop: they churn through doubt and create motion that forwards emotion.
Some days I feel like being caught at the Beaver Street train crossing is a personal assassination of my very important life. But yesterday I turned off the ignition and said aloud, “Hello my good life. Look at that blue sky.” And look how much fun the tourists are having waving at orange freight cars that flash by. I chuckled because those bicyclists stopped by crossed barriers look like insects caught in honey. An unexpected pause let the trickle of happy heart I live with become a large bright fountain for a few minutes.
Thich Nhat Hanh taught me to let the sound of a bell ringing remind me to take three conscious breaths. The Catholic bells on Beaver Street used to insert those breaths into the massages I was doing at the corner of Humphreys and Elm Street. And once, because I was too underfunded at the time to buy actual flowers, I made a foldout card for an ailing friend and on it I drew a freight train bearing boxcars of flowers to her bedside. Whenever you hear that train horn, I wrote, imagine them coming your way: giant lilies and tons of cosmos and endless mums. Train horn as bell sound.
After my sit with a tree I walk to a clump of oaks where I find a perfect palm size white skull. An exquisite shape, it has a tiny stitch of cross where pieces of skull meet, and two teeth the size of peppercorns are still caught in the curve of jaw bone. At first I pretend to be a scientist figuring out the shape of the animal. Then I free myself with fiction. In my hand is the skull of a Martian once attracted by the energy of dog walking and disc flinging that soaked into the landscape by day. It set down in Buffalo Park on a new moon night. Unlike Rip Van Winkle who wakes up 20 years later, this little Martian dozed so long the ants carried off most of its cells one by one so it never woke up except by becoming nutrition for ants and then food for the lizards that gulped the ants. Now there are lizards out there having dreams of orbiting as they lie in the sun dozing. Now I hold a celestial cranium.
I once read an interview with a wise nun about what a marvel celibacy can be in a life. Freed from romantic fixation an ocean of love arrives more easily to one’s fingertips, one’s tongue, one’s every breath. I had my doubts at the time, but maybe spring mixing into my solo state is what is animating my morning movements today where birdsong nuzzles my ear, a dog shows off its walker’s vast heart, a disc flung with enthusiasm is the perfect demonstration of the graceful arc of love rising and falling, and a curve of skull contains my fiction of a Martian’s dream of interpenetration. I am in love today; I live inside the vast pool of all the love that is everywhere all the time. I’m grateful for the many reminders.
