An Ancient and Unconditional Joy

Another cup of coffee, another ten pages edited. I am sitting in shade, watching robins and rabbits pick through the herb garden. Clouds are tracking unusual winds - moving east to west and sometimes circling back. The heat broke and it is as cool as late August. The mind turns to apples. The mind turns to you.

Let's say that you are sitting beside me, but engrossed in your own work - probably writing but maybe something else. Books are piled near your right hand not because you are going to read them at the moment but because they reassure you of your new commitment. It is quiet where I live, and this quiet is what most impresses itself upon you. One can hear the wind from far away, sense it gathering, feel it somewhere deep (even offer it something there) as it travels down the hill towards the brook and beyond.

From time to time I comment on what I am editing - more in passing than from a need for conversation. Talking too much is a distraction, but I like talking to you. I like that you take notes with a pen and paper. You voice has always settled something in me, or awakened something, and I am grateful to not have to go without it.

Lunch will be bread baked at 5 a.m. yet still faintly warm (I leave it under towels when pulled from the oven), and from the garden cucumbers and spinach lightly salted, sprinkled with vinegar. Perhaps wine, perhaps tea, depending on where we are with our work. Voices are not the only distraction . . .

This is a dream, of course. The twenty sentences are also a sentence, and I bear it alone, as most of the time one must. Yet from time to time an interior window opens - I cannot say precisely how or why - and a beam of light passes through, and one senses then the possibility of an ancient and unconditional joy, met in you, and - oddly, yet happily, rightly even - tended by us in common, despite the many miles, despite the long and heart-breaking silence.