Stones. Billions of little stones piled thick and spread thin across uneven ground as if to hide the fault lines. Leveled, they are tumbled, some crumbled together a layer upon layers of would-be memories. And then in the heat of summer, they spray to fortify and the ground slowly hardens to a walkable black crust. Then the gloss of the tar. Then the yellow lines. Then we move point B from point A with no point but the inertia of wanting that thing that just wasn’t where we were.

And then over time, a miraculous truth pushes itself up. A miraculous and relentless truth pushes itself up through the piles and fortitude and glossing over and coded directions. And the truth will have its way. And the truth will crack every stretch of hiding. And the truth makes the most beautiful thing out of asphalt, don’t you think?

Street art by Roxana Zegan found at Dear Ada.

the law of conservation of energy:
energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, it just changes form

the law of inertia:
any physical object is resistant to change in its state of motion

Where does it go? Where did it come from? To whom does it belong, this warm amber ripple down the throat up the arms over the shoulder down the back around the ribs to the sternum again. This energy arising and subsiding, surfacing and plunging, never gone but never really born to begin with either, always moving always wanting. I am no match for the sheer invincible science of it all, but I can be one thing: the container within which it changes, it moves yet goes absolutely nowhere beyond the birthing walls nor digs deep enough to stay six feet under anything. And I can decide how thin my walls and how fragile my glass. I must. Lest I shatter a thousand times over in and upon myself, ground to make perfect new eyeglasses for the seeing out from another set of browns, or blues, or if lucky again, greens. Pearly, did you call them?

Venus and Jupiter have not fallen anywhere. They’ve just kept moving.

The children: carrying around snowman heads. The flakes: big and round and wet and plentiful all day. The sky: gray and socking us in. The sleeping in: long, then longer still. The winter: pure Michigan. In Boulder. In October.

The most beautiful thing I saw today was a moment of low-hanging cloud rising for the norther Boulder foothills in a way that made it look as if the snow sitting there had simply levitated to build a bridge to the gray that luckily, unlike in Michigan, will not last for the next five to six months. It was a moment inside a day of cuddling up and hunkering down, waking then snoozing then waking then sorting through dreams. And the low-hanging shelf-like clouds stopped my mind in just such a way that I smiled and remembered this whole thing is so odd. To be alive. To be sunny one day and pushed down with the weather system the next. So odd. And sometimes, so beautiful.

Snow child photo by Aiddy.

There’s nothing pretty about a dirty look or a snide, snotty comment. But there is something beautiful in knowing it is pretty much never about us. And if it truly is, who cares? Human is as human does and what we do is down right rude much of the time. Rude. It’s a funny word that describes a quality of action that slights another, that dismisses or disrespects them. But what dismisses and disrespects one may not mean a rat’s ass to another. And even if it does, one person’s rat’s ass may not weight nearly as much as the next one’s. Though we are held to standards of a degree in public, at work, in our personal relationships, it’s good to know that when it all comes down to it, we’re probably doing our best. Probably. And that’s a probability that renders us helpless in the face of all these dirty, snide, snotty moments. Helpless because there will never really be anything any of us can do to erase or prevent it. The beautiful thing? The most beautiful thing? Knowing that in the nothing-to-do-ness of it all, there is the rest of life, the going-about-our-business-ness of it all, and the words of a dear friend of mine, “Just get over it”. Hard but beautiful.

I’ve a new cat. I adopted her from the local Humane Society, called her Olive and have begun getting used to her ridiculous and endearing Tonkinese quirks as I assume she is getting used to my workaholic Midwestern transplant ones, or well… tolerate. That’s what they do, yes? Cats tolerate us. To a point.

Here is my top five list of Olive attacks thus far (that happen usually while I’m asleep):

1. Feline Fado
She talks and talks and yells and when that doesn’t work, she sings. A loud desperate crooning that happens most often around 4 am, and sometimes shortly after I return home and have not refilled her bowl with the first couple of speeches.

2. SWAT Rush
This is where, having attempted to get a good sleeping spot near my head at night, but having been relegated to lower regions of the bed, Olive completes a cycle of leaping off the bed in dejection, saddling up the side and then suddenly with a fury only felines can muster she bounces on the side of the bed and sprints up and across the pillows only to keep running off the middle of the other side.

3.  Simple Little Knife
The second weekend I had Olive, I slept in… late. Too late, according to her. Late enough to deserve a wee little blood draw. I could tell by her chatting, hollering, and singing that she was about fed up with my slumber. But when she hopped up on the bed and seemed to be settling into my ride side, I relaxed to snooze again. Olive, in her wisdom simply (as I imagine in my mind’s eye) raised a little blackened paw and came down deftly with one crawl extracted and snagged expertly into my back. I jumped us both up pretty quickly.

4. Good Love Gone Bad
What is it with cats and their weird chemical rushes that take them from lover to fighter in t-minus three? A little fetch with the bell ball, some vigorous back stroking and a little talk back and suddenly she’s an ears-down, teeth-bared fighting machine. And these aren’t nips – she full-on attacks. I have taken to scruff-of-the-necking her into the bedroom for a closed-door timeout session just to let her walk-off the flood of… testosterone??

5. Sky Dive
Okay, this is the latest, greatest and by far the most aggressive alarm clock maneuver in Olive’s arsenal. She has taken bouncing me out of bed to new heights with this one… literally. She gracefully hops herself up on top of my tall dresser (exactly the place she knows she isn’t supposed to be anyway… and oh, yes she does know) and before I’ve even heard her make the leap, she has landed full force on my near-sleeping back. Bam. Again, we’re up before I can yell holy sh**….

Olive: 5
Heather: 0

A lucky girl, I think so. Which one of us? Probably both.

Maybe it is not a taunting, this bright waving hand in the sky. Left of the moon. North of the girl. Straight home ’til morrow. Maybe it is not waiting, this hovering being hanging low enough to see. Higher than the wishes. Just below the end. And maybe it is not you, a wrath from the past entering my orbit. Faster than I would have imagined. Never fast enough. Maybe it is simply Jupiter and maybe it is just where it needs to be given all the other bodies around it. Maybe. And maybe it is not taunting me. Maybe it is simply beautiful for its own sake.

Photo by Voyager featured at Astronomy Picture of the Day.

A blue bird on a wire on a wall faces east and sings no song. The light shifts and you are there in the shadows of my wings. One blue gray for the sky, for the bottom of the memories, for the hum of the south. One graying gold for the promise, for the top of the milk vat, for the flight never taken. When it is all said and done, the diversions given and taken and hugged tightly into dust, the moments seized mid-hope and mid-exhale, the morrows lives as planned and then some, it is still you that sits in the shadow of my heart. My heart, a bird. A bird sitting silently still on a wire on a wall facing east and not singing, but listening for a song… from the south.

Image by Cheryl Pedamonti via Flickr.

In the buddhist world that I dwell in and out of (I meditate and pray often, and buddhist philosophy spins a web throughout my day to day thoughts and actions, but I do not participate in many gatherings), we have earmarked a few regular experiences for appreciation or overcoming. “Cool boredom” is one such experience labelled such for its obvious qualities of listlessness, breezy ambivalence, and lack of drama. I can’t say as I’ve ever heard much about “Hot boredom” but I assume that would be the more agitated, antsy sort of thing. We appreciate cool boredom for its resting qualities, and watch it in our minds carefully for its tendency to turn into something else less nurturing – like hot boredom or worse.

This morning, and for much of the last few weeks, I have been stepping into puddles of cool boredom -nothing to really do, nothing to much feel about it, just here. If I raise my eyes and mind while here, I do notice a sparkle to the air, a sparkle that is always there for the beholding. I hear sounds and see colors with little grasping at their beauty or menace. In cool boredom, there is almost a reverie. Not quite, because stepping into reverie would be stepping out of the shallow, cool puddle really, but almost.

Boredom is beautiful for me for the break it gives me from my own intense mind. It turns restless easily. It sinks below itself into muddy apathy easily, too. In fact, hanging out in the cool world of nothing to do, nothing to crank up, is a practice in and of itself – a meditation in being okay with the tension of being suspended between the worlds of drama and giving up completely on the passions of this gorgeous life and planet.

Boredom is sweet even in it’s threat of a missed opportunity to be doing something – anything – else. Boredom is generous, nurturing in the time it gives to lay back, if only in our mind’s eye in the stiff dining chair where we sit. Boredom is reassuring in the way that only sitting still and having no fires to put out in that very moment is reassuring. And cool boredom, the kind colored by warm skin and highlighted by a temped air of the heart is a most beautiful thing.

The most beautiful thing I did this weekend happened over and over and over again. Friend to friend, heart to heart, time to time. Of all the end-of-summer plans I indulged in these last three days, the most beautiful were those spent with my dear friends. Gin rummy. Tomato plants ripening. Gelato and coffee. Losing ourselves in a crowd. Bar table banter. Brunch and blogging. All of these things have their own magic but magnified by the presence of one other. So simple. So well understood by every single one of us. So common. So beautiful.

Elephant buttons in this image (and image) found at re: makeables.

Cinnamon. Not-so-secret ingredient spins circles round deep, not quite dark, not quite chocolate coolness. It is chewable sweetcream cocoa velvet and it fits perfectly in this new burnished stainless steel teaspoon which fits perfectly in my mouth. Batch-churned mexican chocolate ice cream is the most beautiful thing I tasted today.

Photo and recipe for your own here.