What a frustrating day. Frustrated with myself for no reason other than that I’m not perfect (and I’m tired). Frustrated with the world in general for its fallenness , and with humanity in particular - myself included - for its self-centeredness.
This image is not from this evening! but it’s a representative local sunset.
So in frustration I took myself outside at sunset/dusk/ twilight and I just walked. I walked down to the end of the street and back, past the pond where an older gentleman (ha, probably not much older than I) was fishing. We greeted each other politely. Mostly I looked at the sky: the layered, shaded, rosy-sunset-edged clouds in one direction, the solidly-billowing grey thunderheads in another, the wispy misty layer of barely-there fluff drifting over the white luminous moon in yet another. The sky in all its variety and distance and vastness tripped up my frustration and let it fall short, reminding me of the gift of limitations: how fortunate I am to be such a small part of creation.
And I smelled the fragrance of the Lowcountry rain approaching through the boisterously delicate flowers of the crape myrtles and the pervasively pungent pluff mud. I actually think I have taken smell for granted so much that I’ve ignored it and believed all my life that I couldn’t smell. I suspect my olfactory sense might just need to wake up and pay attention — to all the gifts that are there in the evening air.
And I listened to the evening calls of the birds and the cicadas and the tree frogs. I began to berate myself for not knowing the names of the birds, let alone not knowing whose call was whose - but I stopped and allowed myself to be small and humble and limited.
And I saw the bats fluttering, much nearer than the clouds, hoping to breakfast on any unwary insects. The bats would have bothered me 14 years ago when we first moved here, had I even known they were so close. The cicadas and the tree frogs certainly gave me pause at the time. They caught my attention, pulled me up short, reminded me that this was a different part of the world, rather like a foreign country, almost an alien universe. I found their voices nearly deafening and vaguely threatening in those early weeks. Now I find them comforting. The voice of home. Home is here too. I am still deeply homesick for the Michigan landscape - but this strange, fragrant, thickly-textured, history-haunted part of the world is part of me now.