Today, I mowed my lawn.
On Thursday, I read a blog post by Jane Meyer that touched me. It’s lovely, and so are the photographs she included. But it reminded me of the quiet moments of my own life, the ones where I achieve a certain stillness, enough to reflect on the details of life around me and within me, and to understand who I am. These moments don’t come often. Not any more. I was thinking about that, after I read what Jane wrote. I feel sometimes like that sense of myself as someone to observe and understand belongs to a younger me. I was still figuring out what life was, then. Now, I’m living it. But do you ever feel, for a few minutes, as if you might lose yourself in the shuffle if you don’t find a way to be still once in a while?
Mowing my lawn is hardly an exercise in stillness. You may not be aware what an odyssey this mowing business is, in my life. You likely have not seen me stalking along behind the mower, cursing whatever president happened to be in office and further cursing his foreign policy and its impact on whatever ship my husband was on at that time. “If it weren’t for foreign policy,” I would mutter, shoving the grumpy mower over the uneven turf, “I might have some HELP mowing this blasted heath.” Continue Reading →
