When you wake up really early…when you’re already getting up early…the rooster doesn’t know when to crow.
I beat him to the punch this morning.
I couldn’t sleep.
It’s freaking early…quiet…peaceful.
I went downstairs to make some coffee and found myself waiting by the stove for the teakettle to boil so that I could pour some hot water over the grounds in the french press and …
just watching the teakettle…waiting…
and I thought, “hey…how much of my life have I spent waiting for something to happen so that I could do the thing that I thought I wanted to do?”
Just watching…waiting….
it’s so early…and I’m standing by the stove…waiting for a whistle to tell me it’s time to move on to the next phase of my morning.
Now, my coffee is ready and I’m drinking it…but still waiting…
Somehow, it’s always easier to see movement after the fact…easier to see where I’ve been when I can look behind me and see the light path I’ve worn.
I guess that we’re really like any collection of molecules anywhere in the world….always moving, even when we’re standing still…vibrating even when we aren’t going anywhere.
I’m in the kitchen in our home on this planet Earth…waiting for the whistle of the boiling teakettle…and I’m spinning through space, held to ground by something I will never understand but that I have to accept as being real.
It holds me…and I wait for my simple morning ritual to complete…really aware of nothing except the “distraction of me”.
Maybe the whole Garden of Eden/Tree of Knowledge story isn’t about God warning not to eat that fruit because it might pose a challenge or display unforgivable disobedience…maybe it was a kindness…like, “Oh….nahhhhh…you don’t want to go there! That’s nothing that you need to know about…just let it be…get on with your lives. You’ve got a good thing going…you don’t need to know about some of that stuff.”
Of course, like the criminal at the end of Clint Eastwood’s 44 magnum, we “gots to know”…so, bingo, we eat the fruit and our eyes were opened and BAM…
Dangit.
DANGIT!!!
Why do I have to know about all of this stuff?!
Why do I have to know about any of this stuff?
It just clouds the issue…makes my head hurt. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle when everything starts to hit the fan.
You can’t get away with just composting the “bad fruit” when you’ve already had a big honking bite.
I’m not riding a brakeless car downhill towards the lake of mental illness…I don’t ponder vibration and the “Garden” and other such unnecessary imponderables very frequently.
I’M REALLY ONLY PLAYING…LIMPING TOWARDS MY 500 WORDS…
Maybe what I’m thinking is that the only things that really matter in this world are the things that we act on. All our words and “watching the teakettle” evaporate like so much steam…they disappear and are gone when we are gone.
All our plans mean doodley squat in the end…it’s only the things that we do that matter.
Watching the kettle is different than drinking the coffee.
I guess that you do have to watch the kettle some before you can make the coffee, though…
Awwwwww…forget it.