On the way home from the baseball field, I pass by a school garden where a woman is working with a toddler nearby. The toddler is helping in her toddler-way, while nearby, a red-haired baby attempts to roll. The last time I saw this woman, who I do not know except by her presence in this nearby garden, she was heavily pregnant. Now, here is her younger child, next to her older child. They are tending the earth. They are the earth.
I walk on.
It’s a beautiful day. A little while later, I am waiting for friends. I’m near the ocean, which is sparkling with its diamonds. A man in suspenders passes me, stepping carefully alongside his cane and his elderly dog. They move at precisely the same speed, neither fazed at all by a barking chihuahua in a pink tutu when it passes them by. There’s a sense that they both have seen it all, already.
A couple in racing gear blurs by on bikes, a whirring, momentary smear of bright yellow and matte black against the radiant horizon.
I’m waiting for my friends here instead of elsewhere because one of them heard that there is a particular wildflower somewhere close by. I’m here first, so I am watching, writing. It’s lovely out today: sunshine, no clouds, no wind. Just an open invitation to leave behind whatever holds us too tightly indoors.
Lately my rebellion, one part of it, has been a quiet one, one in which I’ve focused on being in the same world that I actually occupy. I am turning off the sounds that take me elsewhere, just as I’ve stepped back from all social media: I don’t prefer the virtual. On my morning walks, I leave my earbuds home so that I can hear the birds. I’ve noticed I feel the breeze more acutely. I am listening less to podcasts, to news. To audiobooks.
I think about our fleeting lives and I don’t want to miss mine. A wildflower. A red-haired baby. A man with a cane and a beloved dog.
Later, later, it is night.
I stand under the stars: Polaris, Sirius, Leo the Lion. There is Venus, our sister-planet but not. The waves abundantly, religiously swallow themselves again and again, beyond my eyes but not beyond my ears. The sea lions bark their songs into the dark.
This world is so full. So gorgeous, so heartbreaking, so confusing. I want to hold it close. I want to hold it dear, for as long as I can.
The Wandering Introvert 