The Present, the Future

We're just not used to it this business of taking care of the present. We've always aimed ourselves at the future (what do you see yourself doing five years from now?). The tips of our arrows have been dipped in hope and our bows have flung them forward, always forward.

 

Now we're being asked for something different—and something difficult. We can't send our arrows fletched with hope (hope is the thing with feathers) into the future because we can't see it—or even imagine it. If we let those arrows fly without knowing their destination they may boomerang and rain back on us. Who can know? As an aside I suppose I should acknowledge that a big whack of people think they know: every Op-Ed page, every blog purports to show us our future. I wouldn't believe them, if I were you.

 

I am not you, of course. I am me and I am agreeing with Jon Kabat-Zinn: here is where we are and need to be. If we start taking care of the present (and may I say that up to now we haven't made a very good job of it), we will shape the future as we go. We're doing it already, in many ways. Let's keep on.

 

 

Copyright © 202 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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Thoughts on the Times

Here's where we are: no particular place to go and only one place to be. In that place, for better or worse, as we promised, but not (if I remember correctly) for ever and always the sole companion and yet that's how it is: the two of us at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, at every break during the day, an unnatural (surely) companionship at times sweet, at other times smothering or irritating or infuriating and yet we go on, like a couple of Beckett characters and yet, thankfully, bound by love and respect and care for each other and we grow and thrive and will survive.

 

Now, I like to walk. The rules now seem to allow—or even encourage--a daily walk, as long as it's done with six-foot margins all around.

 

Yet here I sit, cemented in place by a mild but persistent COVID 19 depression. Day after spring day I made the decision: no walk right now. It's too cold. It's raining. Or it might rain. I don't feel like it. I'll walk tomorrow. And then the weather shifted (overnight, as it seems to do here) and suddenly it was too hot. No walk today, or at least not right now. I'll wait till it cools off. I have excuses to fit every weather report.

 

Don't tell me a walk would make me feel better; tell me something I don't know.

 

And when, in the afternoon, shafts of sunlight break through the pewter dome of the sky, or a cool breeze changes the humid air, do I skip out the door? I do not. I say, "Oh, I hope tomorrow is a beautiful day so I can go for a walk" and return to my reading.

 

An hour later I will wander to the kitchen and look around for possible dinner ideas. I prep dinner then cook it. We eat it, together, and the evening continues in the togetherness of the two of us. Tomorrow will be another day, but not so very different from this one.

 

 

Copyright © 2020 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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Bridges

I've never liked walking over

those swaying pedestrian bridges

featured in travelogues.

Maybe I read "The Bridge of San Luis Rey"

by Thornton Wilder

at an impressionable age.

Its lesson was clear to me:

To cross the ravine or the river

on one of those rickety rope bridges

was to gamble with your life.

 

The connection with today's

desperate attempts to build new bridges

toward a better future

is instructive.

Our new bridges, though built from grass roots,

must be strong enough to bear the weight

of our jointly imagined future.

Let's hope some of the builders

are brilliant engineers.

 

 

Copyright © 2020 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

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Listen Closely

Sound has altered.

Within or without the house

is eerie silence,

weird but not unpleasant.

The very tenor of our beings is changing

which is, or may be,

the point:

a shift.

 

Listen closely in this new silence.

Add your voice to it if you are so moved.

Being alone now

you will hear yourself as never before,

no longer muffled by the voices of others.

And not just those voices but the endless cacophony

of what used to be daily life.

Alone now, lift your voice into the emptiness

to discover the ultimate truth:

Nobody is alone.

Allow this to penetrate your lonely soul.

 

 

Copyright © 2020 Ann Tudor
Musings blog: http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00JI4758O

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