Taking things for granted/mysteries

I forget that maybe, the next time I walk around the block you won't be there to greet me, that perhaps the tree in the schoolyard will become a stump, that the preschooler will graduate high school, that I will come across a new word, or an old word that I cannot spell, or one I have wrongly pronounced in the thought-voice of my mind ever since I came across it. And I wonder about the snapshots I have in my mind of things as they were when I last saw them, and I wonder that I recognize the songs of summer birds in spring when I have forgotten them all winter long and could not if my life depended on it describe that melody when surrounded by snow. I marvel that I remember the only time I sat long enough in the forest to watch the swimming shadows so clearly, that I can see the gray shift across the page, the slugs, the only half-remembered mossy log, most distinctly that fluid feeling as the breeze moved the whole forest. I marvel that I remember this pair of eyes, or those ones; and wonder that I avoid looking directly at certain persons while I analyze the faces of others unashamedly.

In my dreams the rooms of different buildings extract themselves, redecorate and form new buildings. Some are haunted and create a sense of unpleasantness behind my back, and I do not want to turn my head to look behind me. Rather, I prefer to think of the dream in which I flew on the back of a unicorn down the stairwell, or swam through the air of the hallway, or the time I walked so fully awake it was surreal along a forest path with a friend.

What is reality? What does it mean to be awake? What is it about having a cat lying across your lap and purring contently that seeps well-being into you, fills you utterly and completely with soft contentment, leaves you relaxed, and at peace? What is it that causes laughter, or the forgetting of laughter? Where do thoughts come from? Why does a galloping dog fill me with joy? For what species are my mirror neurons wired? For what species are your mirror neurons wired? The other day as I watered a geranium, too late--I had let the soil become dry--I discovered the brown skeleton of a dried flower stalk, tiny delicate closed buds dead. Suddenly I felt as though I might cry, recognized without any conscious thought that this was the plant's unwanted abortion. I could not throw away the dried stalk in the bathroom trash, but rather stepped onto the porch and dropped it onto the snowy earth. I cannot explain this. I think there are some things that are known or understood, and it is baffling to me that it is so baffling that we may intuit from unfathomable sources within ourselves useful knowledge, when to gain knowledge from outside exclusively human means (language, mathematics, logic) is by convention understandable.

The other day I looked out a third story window and for the first time saw the trees as so many individual persons near and far, and wondered that I had not always seen them in this way. Perhaps I am more familiar with them now, just as a crowd of strangers blurs into ambiguity of moving objects while a room full of familiar persons is full of distinct personalities. Knowledge changes with experience; experience changes with knowledge; experience changes with experience. I begin to confabulate.