My Oasis

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Another month has sped by. Memorial Day the first holiday of the summer has come and gone. Time is taking me quickly to that indeterminate place called old. My good friends’ last child just graduated from high school. Oh how that makes me feel aged.

As I said the first holiday of the summer passed and I did very little. I watched a movie; I watched part of a TV marathon. I cleaned my desk about 2/3rds of the way toward functional. Oh there was that hiding in the basement for the tornado warning thing, I did that too.

In the silence of the afternoon all is present and all is inscrutable. –T. Merton

On one of the three afternoons of this long weekend I did spend a few moments reading out by the fountain in the backyard. I sat at a chair and listening to the bubbling of the water for a time. Shifting locales I lay in a hammock for an hour or two also.

Being there in the small space behind my home I can offer that there is no silence in either nature or in a suburban locale. However there is a sense of presence in the world. I can’t put my finger on why sitting in my backyard reading about losing anger feels right but it does. Maybe the distance from the world I sense in my act of focus on the article while hearing background birdsong is what Merton was talking.