The Eyes of Ronnie Lawson (a 30:30 report)

One of the nice things of today was stopping to spend some time looking at dragonflies. They’re very beautiful you know, ethereal is a word that counts here, color sparkles in the translucent light and we all race around in circles over the meadow, very large birds float far above, perhaps this is a day where magic will arrive unannounced – though, haven’t I already announced plenty of it.

A magic show, and here’s thinking it begins the moment the eyes slip open and rolling out of the bed becomes the next right thing. Attention is the real deal, at least my Buddhist friends tell me that, it’s the is-ness, Bro, they tell me when we sit in coffee shops in streaming late afternoon sun rays and we laugh with each other and tell interesting stories and maybe look when the door opens to let in or let out – the paying public – and watch, watch, watch they tell me, without judgment, without favor, without much emotion at all, though I do like to rebut that how do you watch a dragonfly and not feel something, and I can’t speak for you (I say to them) but that something does for me feel like a good emotion, one positive and gratifying and in time other adjectives of delight fill my frontal mind and if I go to the bed again at 10 pm and lay there still filled with wonder at what I did notice and the actions and events and comraderies I did watch and after a time, less than 12 minutes, I fade into the Morpheus world, so it’s a fact that magic has been available from the opening of pre-dawn bedroom eyes until something like 10:12 when the swirly land of dreaming whispers to me again.

So, don’t ever think to tell me that life sucks, and just there, those last words, I was in actuality quoting a friend of mine named Veronica Lawson, who gets called Ronnie, and Ronnie is a bit of an “old-time” name but it’s a good one, and it’s Ronnie who is always saying don’t ever tell me that life sucks, and in truth Ronnie does sometimes call herself, she says it like this, a gal with Buddhist tendencies, which I get that description because you really cannot pin that girl down, she’s a floater, she’s a flitter, and if they ever did a remake of “The Music Man” she’d probably get the Shirley Jones part for One because she’s just that lovely and Two she’s always singing around town and Three Ronnie has a dream of making something one day that will get to make a lot of people happy, in this case she’s talking about a Hollywood movie though I can tell you with certainty that she’s been writing a memoir thing for about nine months now, in fact she has invited me over to her apartment and had me sit in the really big, cushy overstuffed chair and just watch her while she goes about memoirizing – if you can dig what I mean when I say that as it becomes a verb rather than a noun though I’m telling you that and I guess Ronnie, if she was hearing me, would say it’s all the same and even dragonflies become something else and earlier came from something else (pupae) but they were always and will always be (here’s the way Ronnie would say it all matter-of-factly) , they were always fucking dragonflies,

And me and some of the kids we hang out with would even jump a little because while lots of us swear like sailors not Ronnie because she explains there is something about swearing that takes away from how you tell what you see and even all your feelings those days you get to meander around in meadows and dragonflies of different sizes and different color highlighting their wings float all around you and of course there was that time two, not one but two landed on her right shoulder and she turned her head just a little so they were — Ronnie and both of them – looking deeply into each other’s eyes, and later that same day Ronnie told me and Chuckie Filkins and Dennis Duarte and a street girl we hang with sometimes who calls herself Little Sheila and since none of us know her we call her what she wants and that day I was telling you about with the meadow sluicing and the deepest of shared looking between the species Ronnie said that if she told us about it and swore while she was telling us, then, well she said, God ought to come right down and kill all the poets, every single one not only alive now but for all time, because it would be pretty much the same, that transgression against what’s beautiful,

All of which, if I can regroup here a second and think about yesterday when I walked all the way from my apartment in the west end past the cove with its gulls and marsh oysters and the old boatyard and little groves of stunted trees to her apartment near the beach in Silvervale, when I got to her place Ronnie and I put on some Roy Orbison albums and Bobby Vee on the spindle so they change by themselves and you don’t have to do each one, like it was only with 45’s when we were younger but I already told you about magic and who’s to say that Little Sheila didn’t show up to the garage where Chuckie sleeps (he’s got permission) with a record player which loaded LP’s like 45’s like I just said and everyone eventually saw it that day, a Saturday, and there were lots of “Wows” and “No fucking way’s” and “Fucking insane’s” and as far as I know poets around town plus the whole world over didn’t drop dead so either God was sleeping or maybe Ronnie meant only in particular circumstances does swearing especially that “F” word lead to verse-enabling catastrophe, but yesterday we (Ronnie and me) danced to Orbison and Vee for three hours straight and then we ordered and had a pizza delivered and Ronnie, who also talks a lot about abundance and you’ve got to trust it and count on it and believe it and therefore share it so she gave the kid who left the pizza five bucks for a tip and I asked her if I could give her a big hug and what I promised would be a luscious warm kiss as a thank you from the whole planet for her generosity and ongoing making everyone and everything better and she said sure and I did and she agreed and it may explain that I was not seen returning from the apartment of Miss Lawson past the old boatyard until about 10:30 this morning…..

And if you want to go on and talk about magic and paying attention to the littlest things and if you want to keep talking about beauty and abundance behaviors and if God actually sleeps or watches British cable TV most of the time or works picking grapes in the Central Valley out in California or possibly we become a tad mystical here and say maybe we will talk about God is really one of those dragonflies we see around here on days we are lucky or even all those dragonflies at the same time, because it’s God we’re talking about, which is a cool thought like maybe that meant Ronnie and God had a friendly staring contest one day in the meadow.