I’m not entirely happy with the ways things have turned out. None of us are, surely. But if I sit, quiet and still, as I do now, and push aside the distractions, the moments spill — of particular joy, or serenity, or both, all. Of sharpness of feeling such that the imprint remains, vivid in a way only memories can be. So many of them, abundant as stars in the sky. Each shimmers at the edges as it emerges, as a page of an illustrated book crossing the afternoon’s sun’s rays pouring through a window adjacent; a happy dream, a dream of a long restful night. So, so many moments. Warm welsh sand in summer, the blue estuary emerging through an avenue of trees. Pan pipes and cheese plants one summer on campus. Millie chasing her playmate, tipping over, her tongue hanging out. Suna, dear Suna, applying lip balm to her lips, again. Chilled white linen bedding against the skin after a humid August night in the Deep South. The Pacific waves softly smashing the moonlit rocks on Stinson Beach. Green-blue specks of Greenland’s endless white inching by on the slow approach to New York and a new life. They seem endless these caches of joy (for is not high emotion all joy of a kind, perversely?)- an abundance of pinpoint riches in circulation, pouring from the artery of memory opened by a momentary choice only to reflect. All this consciousness, this vast library of sensation, of complexity, of vulnerability, of irreversible time – an inexplicably entangled compendium of sensual treasures, enduring yet destined to pass, to disappear for eternity with the carrier.
