Part and Impartial – the elements of joy

We wake to a smidge of daylight and the surge and whine of traffic through our open windows. “This is our last windows-open morning for a while,” I tell Bob. It’s been nearly a week of long, down-comforter nights listening to crickets and frogs and whatever else the neighborhood serves up.

Sometimes it’s a man calling a feral cat. “Fritz!” Wait a beat, “Fritz!” for ten minutes or so. One night it is a different male voice a little further down the road shouting something unintelligible and later, a barking dog. Two plus two says he was calling the dog, found it, and hooked it up to the yard tether.

On another night, I am alarmed by something rustling fiercely among the big fig leaves outside our bedroom. I pat Bob’s arm, but he is deeply asleep and does not wake.

In the morning, I tell him I heard something as big as a bear in the fig tree, but we agree it was probably a trash panda or a deer. Then I fold myself into his shape and we lay, warm beneath the covers, breathing cool morning air, thinking about nothing but the feel of our bodies.

We are both a part of and impartial to the world around us. We are elements within a greater context, like a crossed “t” on a handwritten page, one letter out of many, isolated components of a greater whole.

Later, I look for ripe figs but find only remnants.

The next morning, I pull on a sweatshirt and take my half cup of decaf to the back porch to welcome the day. The high whine of a motorcycle traveling way faster than the 45-mile-per-hour limit obliterates the morning stillness. I stiffen against the sound, thinking, That guy is gonna end up killing someone, but by the time I settle into my rocking chair, his noise is a distant buzz.

It was just a sound, I tell myself. Not to be judged or reacted to, but noticed and dismissed along with everything else. Along with the baby bird chirps, the damp railings, and the little squirrel giving me side takes from a crepe myrtle. Perhaps the squirrel is deciding whether to react to my movements or dismiss me.

As a child, I learned to use a critical eye while watching my brothers play. My mother dubbed me “her centurion,” her guard in the doorway ready to sound an alert should kids’ play turn dangerous as it often did. Those boys. Playing wilder and rougher until someone got hurt. I leaned into her praise, embracing my role with relish. I would catch the mayhem in its first syllable before anyone got hurt.

In my thirties, I sought professional help. I would sit with a compassionate woman in her intentionally unremarkable therapy room and talk about my problems and my dreams. She taught me, among other things, the difference between observation and judgment, and I vowed to, one day, completely shed my sentry cape. So this has been my life’s work: to detach. To sense, accept, and be at peace with everything the world sends my way.

I look up and the squirrel is gone.