side-watching

I’m out in the garden (the backyard/the patio) this morning for Reasons. The weather thus far is cooperating — mostly overcast, frequent breezes, no moisture from the sky as of yet.

I had trouble engaging my routines this morning. Yesterday was full routine-fail, as were the two days before that. My analytic brain wants to puzzle out whys, my feeling brain is exhausted by anything my analytic brain encounters, and I’m practicing holding a truce while attempting to discern if it’s a more-rest or more-action moment. (My hormones — pretty sure it’s them — are roasting me multiple times a night and occasionally across these days. That’s Not Helping.)

Now that I’m in the garden for two, two-and-a-half hours, there’s even fewer ways to skip my devotional practices… or practicing them can serve as procrastination on other work I’ve set down for myself…. Either way I’ve read three pages of poem, spoken and inscribed some Jeremiah 46, and spent 12 minutes…

Not of silence. It’s not silent outside. Of listening, and attending to listening — and stillness.

Still enough that one of the Texas spiny lizards that lives here climbed up the low table across from me — let’s say four feet away? — and surveyed the landscape. They do that often, I’ve observed from my desk in the office, securely on the other side of the glass doors. I congratulate myself that I’m enough like furniture that they opted for their routine.

I realize I’m looking directly at them.
This is bad manners — staring is predator behavior, or at least domination — and I shift my head and look away.

They were looking at me head-on, too. I glance after a bit, glance again after another bit, and they are looking off — into the middle distance? — as well.

We are not threatening each other. We are nevertheless watching each other.

*

I wonder what drifts through their head.

Mine holds traffic sound and breeze — curled low rosemary and heart-shaped redbud leaves — to-dos that I try to drop like too-hot tableware — this post — nothing here to eat me, demand me, push me —

I don’t even have to sit in stillness. The lizard is enough. I, despite what I might rather be, am enough.

Looking at that out of the corner of my eye is also more than enough.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.