small revelations are important too

Albrecht Dürer, "Wing of a Roller"

It’s the way the light falls across the bay bridge in the mornings, the ships glitter slowly across the water, the barges and little boats with their sails billow open. I watch from a wide open window as people walk by with armfuls of vegetables, cradling a baby and eating a strawberries by the stem - in their baskets: little gem lettuces and pink radishes, young green leeks, warm pillowy bread, medjool dates and bunches and bunches of greens, herbaceous and bright. The world is changing and there are all of these difficult, helpless, problems. But the pears are still ripening, the butter is still cold and delicious, the sunlight catches on a mother’s golden hair, a child is laughing and singing.

*

It’s in the midst of uncertainty, and a deep sense of listlessness, and in those quiet moments that the words pour out of me. If you boiled down the sum of all language, you’d get to the repetitive thump of the heart. The recurrence of persevering patterns is all — you’ll suffer in the same ways, and hide in the same ways and run in the same ways. Some ideas haunt you forever, attach themselves to the very vertebrae of your mind, burrow themselves deep inside your heart.

*

It’s the pleasure for pleasure’s sake, only experienced fully when you neither seek nor shrink from it. Recognize it as an emergent inevitability: oh there it is. It’s there in the moments I’m cooking alone at night, music swirling in the air, it’s there in the throng of activity, in the swing of the arm, the shiver of the breeze. The simple feeling of time expanding and feeling every sense move through you. Even if those feelings aren’t always positive: anger and hurt and sadness and nostalgia. To feel and let those emotions shift and topple inside of you like dominos, a blood orange rush, a blitz, an unfurling, an unclenching of a fist.

*

It’s how you pay attention, it’s the tenderness with which you perceive the world. It is how you witness something beautiful, and it changes your entire definition of beauty. Attention is prayer, is the highest and purest form. I’m good at noticing, but I’ll admit you’re better. I think you know all my vices. Even though I try to be so contained, I know my heart leaks all over the place. There are some people you can’t be indifferent toward. Know that I’m not impressionable, yet you left a fingerprint.

*

It’s pure innocence that we aren’t able to predict what’s good for us. Or that our models of the world are fragile, and they break experientially all the time. I’m far from being good. The person who seeks revelation and forgiveness is me. In the stained glass cathedral, in the bodega, laying flat in the grass in Dolores Park, at the face of my failures, staring up the bottom of the bell jar, in the apartment cooking pasta. I’ll look for them, those little precious moments of revelation, of closeness to the world, and to God, and to goodness and truth: when the bulb blows out, when these tears mend, and the fractures are filled with gold, when intelligence is too cheap to meter, when we meet again, when the birds lift their eyes, and the air is filled with the sound of beating wings.