(Today I deviate from my usual family and kid oriented posts.  I want to share this, instead.  This is what happened today and I think it happened largely because I was home, by myself, freed from my daily morning parental responsibilities.)

 

Today I woke up according to my body’s time table.  Baby Jack, my painfully reliable alarm clock, was not around to pierce my dreams with his early morning cries at 6:04.  Charlie was also not around to stomp in the room bringing with him his wet diaper at 7:30.  Baby Jack, Charlie, and Mike have gone to Fresno to visit Mike’s family.

 

I don’t think I woke up right away.  There was some part of me that was awake and conscious of the warmth in my room.  Yet I remember still being mired in some dream I was having.  Slowly, though, the warmth and the stillness in my room pervaded.  And with them came lots of memories of things and years past, all related to being warm and being still.  The memories didn’t crowd my mind, however.  They didn’t clamor for attention and I didn’t feel the need to dissect them as I am wont to do when a memory comes to me.  They were just there, lacing my consciousness, generating a sense of warmth and stillness.

 

It didn’t feel like I was fully awake because I didn’t feel energized to get up and start living the day.  However, I was awake and my senses were alert.  For some time, I don’t know how long and it doesn’t matter, I didn’t move.  I just lay on my bed, breathed, and simply experienced the world in my room in all its stillness.  I heard the complete quiet.  I did not think of anything-  I let the world in.  I don’t think I have ever experienced the world so completely stripped of its noise and chaos.  And I don’t think I have ever been so completely receptive to it.  Cheesy as this may sound now, I feel as if the world and I got together by chance, just us without our extra layers of noise, and nothing else was needed.  I can’t now fully articulate how I felt- I cry at the seeming perfection of that moment.

 

Since this morning, the world has resumed its usual hustle bustle- I can hear cars whizzing by, people animatedly conversing, sprinklers spraying water on the lawn.  I, too, have turned on my computer and am now tapping on my keyboard while listening to a string quartet, my mind racing with hundreds of ideas as I work on crafting this blog post.  Soon the boys will be back bringing with them their boundless energy.  Somehow, I need to figure out ways to create more opportunities for encounters with stillness just like this.

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