Credit: M. Jakubowski

This focus on Else, I am thinking while walking, everything everywhere, cities and towns the world over, what we’ve achieved at the office or the church or the classroom is beautiful of course and nothing to sneeze at. But in the end of the self, whether God’s involved a little or a lot, it’s to something else entirely apart from our memories and accomplishments that we first return.

The flora we call weeds thick and green against the steel poles holding up a fence around a pad of oily concrete. Sparrows abounding in the gutters in cracked building corners, every thorny bush between home an office. Beware resistance to this palace of small places we are headed towards, the bodily noises of the weeds and small birds seem to say. So on days when I am aware in my way feeling what prayerful people call at peace, days without sleep over several nights, the office and the family plans and the past fade into their moment, etched with modest gratitude. Not places of nothingness. The urge isn’t to throw it once and for all away into some other place beyond with the angry force of regret. There’s no regret. Regret is for egoists.

But these things here and now beneath my feet and at eye level that will be here and were here long ago are the next stage we will step onto. This fact will never age, even as sparrows evolve and blades of grass hybridize. It’s enough to make the walk from the bus to the front door something a different kind of person might call miraculous, before they disintegrate into sleep, or the hope of another year that in many cases will not come.