(no subject)
-Sara Teasdale, “Night”
Yesterday, a woman was walking to her car in the parking structure and encountered a deer, which ran out, jumped the iron fence, and disappeared into the hills. I had to smile about this as I sat at my desk worrying about money and ethics and how I’ll ever afford a home. Later, a plump red-trailed hawk greeted me from its favorite lightpost (mine too) over the 118 freeway. When I’m driving and I see crows on lawns or in gutters, I always beep my horn and laugh as they jump. The sun can make me smile when I notice it, and the rain brings a tense excitement like electricity to me - when I really think about it.
I haven’t needed a lovely thing in a long time - it’s been so long since I needed those hawks on the lightposts to get through each day intact - when they were almost the only thing that brought me home each day and the mockingbird at night was the only way I would sleep soundly. Life has taken an upswing and things are so wonderful that I forget to look for the beautiful things. But because I stopped looking, as beautiful as my own life has become, the world around me has only gotten uglier. Friends not answering phones, assholes in $60,000 cars on the road, the absolute idiocy of human interaction that 99.9% of us accept as status quo and the rest of us are too terrified to speak out against. I start not wanting to go out into the world. A trip to the movie theater seems almost too much to bear. Grocery shopping is like a car crash. Most nights, I’d rather Marie and I just stay in, drinking wine and laughing on the couch. And this isn’t good either - though life has greatly improved (so much, I can’t even put it in words), there is room to go.
The problem is that ugly things, you don’t have to look for them at all. When you notice the hawk on the lighpost, it makes your day - but you can just as easily not notice it. Some days, I get distracted and drive right under the lightpost without even looking. But the ugly things are just there, and by the time you realize what you’re seen, it’s too late. This morning I saw a dead raccoon by the freeway, and some 50 feet down the road, another one. Probably a pair, crossing together.
No hawk can bring a person back up after that. No startled crow splashing in a gutter, no deer eating flowers in the parking lot. There’s nothing you can do. Give the day up as a loss, take a different route to work tomorrow, and hope there are heart-shaped deer prints on the asphalt or a sparrow in the trees when you get there to help you start the day off right.
Yesterday, a woman was walking to her car in the parking structure and encountered a deer, which ran out, jumped the iron fence, and disappeared into the hills. I had to smile about this as I sat at my desk worrying about money and ethics and how I’ll ever afford a home. Later, a plump red-trailed hawk greeted me from its favorite lightpost (mine too) over the 118 freeway. When I’m driving and I see crows on lawns or in gutters, I always beep my horn and laugh as they jump. The sun can make me smile when I notice it, and the rain brings a tense excitement like electricity to me - when I really think about it.
I haven’t needed a lovely thing in a long time - it’s been so long since I needed those hawks on the lightposts to get through each day intact - when they were almost the only thing that brought me home each day and the mockingbird at night was the only way I would sleep soundly. Life has taken an upswing and things are so wonderful that I forget to look for the beautiful things. But because I stopped looking, as beautiful as my own life has become, the world around me has only gotten uglier. Friends not answering phones, assholes in $60,000 cars on the road, the absolute idiocy of human interaction that 99.9% of us accept as status quo and the rest of us are too terrified to speak out against. I start not wanting to go out into the world. A trip to the movie theater seems almost too much to bear. Grocery shopping is like a car crash. Most nights, I’d rather Marie and I just stay in, drinking wine and laughing on the couch. And this isn’t good either - though life has greatly improved (so much, I can’t even put it in words), there is room to go.
The problem is that ugly things, you don’t have to look for them at all. When you notice the hawk on the lighpost, it makes your day - but you can just as easily not notice it. Some days, I get distracted and drive right under the lightpost without even looking. But the ugly things are just there, and by the time you realize what you’re seen, it’s too late. This morning I saw a dead raccoon by the freeway, and some 50 feet down the road, another one. Probably a pair, crossing together.
No hawk can bring a person back up after that. No startled crow splashing in a gutter, no deer eating flowers in the parking lot. There’s nothing you can do. Give the day up as a loss, take a different route to work tomorrow, and hope there are heart-shaped deer prints on the asphalt or a sparrow in the trees when you get there to help you start the day off right.