There are such days. When the only thing to do is to yield to the urge to look out of the window, thoughtless. Days on which to let the rose petals lie where they fell, the spent stem still in the jar. These are not do-nothing days, they are dreaming days. They are not thoughtless days, they are thought-birthing days – the long subconscious labour of bringing something from deep within that is reluctant to arrive, or has a long way to swim, that it must rise slowly, decompressing on its way to
the surface. There is no rush; there is spaciousness and time.
There will be such days, and they should be welcomed – the restful, healing, window-looking days. Cloud-watching. People-watching. This is not disconnection. It is wool-gathering, spinning, the taking of threads that we haven’t yet imagined a use for.
Perhaps today is such a day.
There are such days when a friend wants to visit and you know that you will be as grateful if they change their mind as you will be to see them, on schedule, ish, because they never turn up right on time and you’re learning to live with that.
There will be the days when you have a heap of stuff you planned to get done, but somehow finishing the book you were reading was more important, because you’d been drawn in to the story about the boys and the calliope - a word you still have to look up because you don’t know its meaning but you can feel the rushing round of the carousel, speeding up, forwards or backwards,
the galloping horses and their poles and your own memories of fairgrounds which are more haphazard in this country, don’t even have a midway, though you sort-of know what one would look like, and the rushing on of the story is such a master-class in writing you want to tell everyone they must read this book, but it was published the year you were born, so they probably already have.
Days when you recognise how much you have missed, how little you know, and what a joy that is because you have so much more to stumble across.
There are days when stumbling is alright.
There are such days as these. Sunshine days spent tending the garden, knowing it is winning, and you are not. Days when you wonder whether the amber sacks on the peach tree are chrysalis or blight, when you remember to take the pictures but forget to send them to the person who might have answers for you. And these are important days because they are also the ones that you notice, despite insect infestation or whatever, there are peaches – small and green and fuzz-skinned fruit – which might take as along as you’ll be away the next few days to grow bold and rich and ripen ready for when you return.
Days when you have to shower off the black-fly coating arms and legs before you can sit down to a cup of tea. Days when that is ok, because your friend is at home in your home, and has already put the kettle on and fetched the milk from the fridge.
There will be many such days, if you are lucky.
If you are lucky, you will see the days just as they come. Such days are blessings because they choose to be what they are, not what you might, in your half-intentional, human, got-to-do state of mind, have thought you needed them to be. Such days know, better than you do, what you need them to be.
You need them to be all sunshine and crystalline skies.
You need them to be scudding cloudscapes.
You need them to be the afterward of thunderous downpours, that soaked the earth, while you slept the sleep of the innocent…days when you wake to find the world new-washed and glistening.
There are such days. When you pull up the dead-and-dying stuff and notice just how much life there is in your soil. Days when the blackbirds (Mr & Mrs) come down to the feast you have lain bare, and you hope that they don’t take it all. Days on which to work hard until the bins are full and it is time to stop, even though the job is only half-done, because somewhere inside you know that the rest can wait, the world will not stop turning just because you decide to rest a-while. Days on which the work is…just what it is…when you realise that you have spent an hour or two or more or most of the day doing and not thinking.
In all our intentionality to ‘just be’ we may be missing the importance of ‘just do’.
There are such days, when doing is the same as being, because we are not in the abstract but in the real. Days when clearing the dying-back alkanet and watching the woodlice and tiny spiders and the snails and the birds that come down to feed on them does not spark poetry or story-telling, but only nettle-stings and who knew that ladybirds can bite? And realising that we still haven’t bought new gloves and how easy it is to cut skin with secateurs and when did I run out of plasters?
There will be such days as when the thing you wanted to tell your friend you really didn’t want has been sanded and waxed and you find that you love it almost as much as they do…days when you know for certain you can only see what is and not what it might become…and that they are wiser than you are. And that they are still here to teach you patience and potential. Days when you love them a tiny bit more precisely because of that There are such days.
There are such days as these. The ones we relinquish control over. The ones we accept. The ones where we listen to what someone has to say, without needing to respond to it. The ones when we simply look around the room or the garden or wherever we find ourselves. The ones where we say ‘yes’ because that is the only sensible answer to such days as these.
