so orange
Monday night I was jotting down a few things on the “Tuesday To Do” list. These aren’t hard and fast things, mostly, the Blog is and sitting is and often the timed writing is. Not ‘goals’ so much as it will be good to begin and finish these things. Some sense of moving ahead with this life. So, there’s typical stuff each day and then there are that particular day’s callings, waving their little hands, and Monday night, for Tuesday, I wrote clean out – simplify – my room, and remove the excess baggage from my computer. The stuff I hang onto forever, and usually don’t look at again, even forget it’s there. Things which in the moment I save them feel important, and aren’t important. You know what I mean – stuff like that.
So, here it is, Wednesday morning, and I’ve done none of the “Tuesday” specific acts – the room looks like it did Monday. The computer has all the same junk and business and repetition and hodge podge it had Monday.
Monday night before I came home and began writing down these ideas, I had stopped at my gas station in OB – after the meditation meeting, after pushing the river – and the credit card did not work in the gas pump reader. I tried over and over, like, come on, it worked for something just the other day, and finally went in to the office and paid a certain amount and after a few more times it took. Having that in mind – the credit card smudged or scratched or on death’s doorstep, and living 1001 miles from the credit union which has generously provided that line of credit – I called the credit union Tuesday afternoon, and despite my wishing out loud, really loud – please don’t change the numbers, just send a spiffy new piece of plastic – I was told there’s many rivers to cross, even the ones you don’t push, and we’ll get you 16 new numbers on new plastic in the mail. So I wrote myself a note on the “To Do” pad, for today: brainstorm wherever there’s an automatic payment or things will stop working all of a sudden, and maybe very important things. Then I went for a walk.
Along the walk, down 28th toward the eucalyptus grove, I happened to see out of the corner of my left eye a beautiful glow of orange in the soft sunlight, turned out it was from a number of orange flowers blooming in a tree close by the sidewalk. Their orange-ness, their beauty, was stunning. It made me stop – not just stop walking. Stop. When I resumed, further down the street, it began to dawn on me that maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if all of a sudden I couldn’t stream this channel or the PayPal wasn’t paying or Amazon was bouncing back my book orders, and then, right there on the walk, it came to me that the great credit card breakdown was doing exactly what I’d written as a goal the day before – clean out the baggage. Simplify your life.
I don’t believe that would have dawned on me where it not for the orange flowers. And stopping just a bit.