A Window
The rising sun reflects fire red upon the glass pane of a bedroom window on the east side of the house behind mine. Crimson conflagration as predawn light sets the leaves of a Japanese maple ablaze. There is something painful and exalted in looking out of the same window daily, searching for poetry, meaning, or peace. It can never really be the same window. Like the old saying about stepping into a river, you can’t look out of the same window twice. You are not the same person. It is not the same world outside.
The seasons are changing, your consciousness is sliding from one perspective to another, influenced by hormonal fluctuations as much as by life events, or minor chemical dependencies. Another cup of coffee, another sunrise, the fifth day in your reproductive cycle. Joy is teased out of these things. I hesitate to call it a mechanical assemblage of experience because those words fall like kill-joy cynicism. I don’t mean that it is only this. I mean that it is all of this and more.
Let’s leave room for magic, for spirit, for song. Tell a bird she is a mechanical assemblage of experience. This will not stop her from singing. She’ll merely blink at you with dark-eyed curiosity, determine whether you can steal her life from her or feed it, or neither. Then she’ll either fly or sing. Be untroubled by thieves of life and joy. Sing or fly. Eat a spider or two. Rejoice in the color of dawn bleeding brightly onto maple leaves. We are all in flux.
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