linger and dawdle

I set out on a walk yesterday afternoon to a favorite spot on the Cabrillo Bridge. It was quite warm and I was sweating when I arrived, happily discovering a wind tunnel of sorts blowing straight up the 163 from downtown and the view into the Big Bay and Coronado Bridge and the Pacific beyond. All from this bridge – one of San Diego’s “Seven Bridges.”

My intention was a short trip out and back, Monday night’s meditation meeting in the wings. And yet, I didn’t leave. I simply leaned against the concrete wall and enjoyed the day. Eleven airplanes flowed in on their descending flight path from my dawdling left to San Diego’s International Airport and it’s one runway just off and down to my right, where arriving and departing planes take turns.

Eventually I pushed through a summer afternoon’s inertia and made my way down to the First Avenue Bridge – another of the “Seven” – and lingered there, lost in the lowering airplanes and the faraway Cabrillo Point, Maple Canyon below. After a while – from within a place where and when clocks hide in summer shadows – I walked up First to the “Self-Realization” meditation center and found my way down past the stone elephants and into a soft chair in a sitting area.

The dangling branches and leaves blowing in the breeze overhead, the warmth of the air, water softly slurping in a fountain up the path, I’ll tell ya, I felt I could stay there maybe forever.

This is Henry David Thoreau from Walden – “Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house….I grew in those seasons like corn in the night.”