This Place You've Never Been
This place you’ve never been; your own backyard, the sidewalk in front of your house, the stretch of road between your driveway and the highway. Your life unfolds here, but you’ve never been here, in this mysterious ephemeral landscape that changes with the seasons and repeats these changes annually with infinite variation. The spring of the small bees, the spring of lingering mists, the spring of early blossoms. Your body occupied space in those springs, but you were not there.
Your little slice of suburbia is a foreign land, you, an alien musing on possible futures, a supposed past, that thing some person said. A career change, a new pair of shoes, a vacation someday, how to lose the weight, how to gain the money, that show you binge-watched deep into the night, that’s where you dwell. Around you, strawberry berries fall from a tree onto the sidewalk and stick to your shoes. Small white fungi ascend a stump, like fairy steps. Sap drips lusciously from the bark of a pine capturing sunlight in frozen amber droplets.
It is a wondrous kingdom teeming with beauty and life, this place you’ve never been. If you pause and let it penetrate your senses, welcome it with your eyes, ears, and nose, what sweet pleasures of bird song, windchimes, and chainsaws, the aroma of cut grass, roses, and hot asphalt. Moss creeping over tile, lemons dripping from heavy boughs, cats reclining in windows. Exalted ho-hum, this place that is home, this assumed unknown, an exquisite phantom hovering just outside your skin, longing to be sensed.
“...but there is beauty, and sublimity too, for those who know "how to observe" the earth, and sea, and sky: and in less than a day's journey…”- ENGLISH PICTURES, By The Rev. Samuel Manning, LL.D., and The Rev. S. G. Green, D.D., 1889