“We're after the same rainbow's end,
Waiting 'round the bend.
My huckleberry friend,
Moonriver, and me.”
-henry mancini
There is this thing about me. I do not feel things
passively. Feelings usually pass through me like thunderstorms. Whatever the emotion,
it is almost always either a conflagration or an abyss. I’m still trying to figure out how to
make this work in my favor. Anais Nin said, “You must not fear, hold back,
count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation
comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish
yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which
then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing.” So maybe I
shall pour the buckets of rain from all those thunderstorms of emotion into a
645,876,053.67 page exposition on my life. Get stoked for that.
Despite my lack of dog, which, I always have thought was the
ultimate defining characteristic of adulthood, I have really been feeling like
a bonafide grown-up lately. (At 29, one might say, “It’s about damn time”, but
I’ve always been somewhat of a late bloomer.) No, it is because I have found
myself aware of blessed moments at the exact moment I am existing within them.
And this has become a beautiful part of being alive. I’ve confessed my avowal
to the Kurt Vonnegut quote about recognizing happiness at its exactness; well,
the more aware I become of both the trivial and grave tragedies of life, the
more I come to realize that those blessed moments- the ones when your heart
beat slows in effort to make them last just a little bit longer- they exist if
only for the reverent duty of providing the balm to help us convalesce through
the ones whose sole purpose seems to be to break us.
I am lucky. I can count on only one hand the times when life
has given me "storms [I] cannot weather", and not enough hands
on which to count the ones that have caused cartoon-like phosphenes to linger
in a dreamlike crown around my reality. So I am grateful for that. But shame on
me, because I have allowed too many of these moments to pass me by without
acknowledging them in the best way I know how. So, I do that now.
Capture my heart for even a second, and it’s quite possible
you will have it for the rest of my days. Mine is not a love easily dissuaded. And
though I confess that it is not such a magnificent feat TO ignite my ardor, there
is something sacred to me about the honesty of a child’s love. It seems to me
that they love as Neruda did: “without knowing how, or when, or from where…
Simply, without problems or pride… because [they] do not know any other way of
loving but this.” There is one of these sweet little souls who captured my heart
years ago when he “lasso’d” the moon and presented it to me with his tiny, open
arms. If there is a grown-up version of this boy, I’d like him to please come
find me so that I may give him my whole world. Anyway, boys have a tendency to forget
their tenderness of heart as they get older and figure out what it means to be
the world’s definition of a female counterpart. But for whatever reason, this
one hasn’t yet forgotten. Bedtime rituals in his home consist of a song, a
prayer, and a story which usually lulls him and his sweet little sisters off to
dream big things in their little beds. When it came to Boy’s turn to pick a
song, he requested, "the one about the moon that Brittany used to sing to me".
So, I sang, and he hummed along, and then when it ended, my
little huckleberry friend said, “Brittany, that was kind of tender for me.” Oh,
my. Jane Austen once said that there was no charm equal to tenderness of heart, and I don't know that there is even one fiber of my being that would protest that. As those few moments of my life were irrevocably entwined with that
precious little person’s, I kept my eyes closed, and held on to them for as long
as they would linger. Something about closing one’s eyes during an experience
solemnizes it, after all. Those few precious, blessed moments softened and strengthened me
all at once and it was so sweet a feeling that even I- the girl who reads the dictionary- would not attempt to describe it. I would, however, venture to say that Boy and I at least have proprietary rights to
the moon after all this.
^ That unlabeled feeling. It most certainly did not pass through me like a thunderstorm. It tip-toed in and didn’t pass through me at all. It
remains. And when I remember it, it quiets the chaos and it slows my cadences
and I am reminded that goodness is just as real as the barrage of depravity
fighting against it. Part of the beauty of being an individual is that our realms of awareness differ from person to person. How very much I cherish this new found awareness of the sanctity of what can be found within a few blessed moments. I used to think that to be impacted, I had to experience that thunderstorm of emotion. But thank goodness I'm 29 now and I know better.
Peace and Love.
Image: http://mynewlifeinsavannah.blogspot.com/2012/09/a-sad-moon-river-in-savannah-passing-of.html
