You love sitting in the car while D goes into the store. You love coming to a stop, becoming silent, and watching life, people, birds, clouds, trees, or just sitting there doing nothing.
You love the large lady coming out the door with tattoos all over her arms and legs, wearing a stretched-tight Dodgers T-shirt and holding a little white dog.
You love the tall, skinny guy with a bum leg going in with a chrome drainpipe tucked under his crutch.
You love the two Mexican house painters, their whites covered with paint, standing outside finishing their smokes before going in (for paint, you imagine).
We are walking on a sunshine-filled afternoon, and you stop to view an empty baseball field. You love the empty baseball field. It holds a lifetime of memories and associations: the backstop, the baselines, the worn-out pitcher’s mound, and the outfield, now all empty and quiet, as though waiting for when players return to run out on the field.
You love the penumbra of the sun shining from behind a giant Eucalyptus tree. You are the sun, tree, shadows, and fallen leaves, and then, high above in the blue, blue sky, a wedge of honking geese flies over on their way south. It’s almost too much to take.
There is a stump of an ancient Eucalyptus by the side of the trail. It is easily 5’ in diameter and bleached grey by time. You try to count the rings, but the middle has rotted out. You stand and admire it for a while, its old roots like elephant legs going into the earth. Though it has been dead for many years, you know this old stump as life itself, and mysteriously, it knows you as the same.
You love the tangled piles of big, brown Sycamore leaves caught in the grass beside the trail.
Returning home, you make matcha tea for yourself and D. You love all the little kitchen rituals of boiling water, whisking the tea, and foaming the milk. While making the tea, you are wondering about love for the millionth time. Observing closely as you pour the tea, you see, also for the millionth time, that love, that aspect of effortless being, has no cause and wants nothing. It is just what you are, what we all are, what life is in the present moment, and only the present moment.
Those honking geese are almost always too much to take/ always I stand, face to the sky, transfixed, their cries, bells ringing me to kneel in the present…
She must have been a beauty.