In the middle of mayhem and deep concern; in the middle of fearfulness for your friends in the middle of a wildfire; right there in the middle of your day, around 2PM, you turn around and glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, a white bowl filled with apricots. And everything stops. The worry-and-flurry ceases and all the balls you've been keeping afloat drop. For about 10 seconds, you just stand there. It's just you and the apricots.
There’s an unfamiliar but not unpleasant feeling of holding two opposite truths simultaneously: some people you love are in grave danger and the simple, unmediated beauty of a bowl of tiny apricots.
Later, you find out your friends are safe. Later, you take a photograph of the apricots. Later, normal life starts building it’s familiar shapes and responses and protections. Later still, the apricots get eaten and given away and made into jam. Even more rebuilding begins to happen, internally and externally. Life marches on.
Now you start thinking you can hold on to the apricot moment just a little. You know better, you know it’s actually no longer yours if it ever really was. Maybe, you hope, the apricot moment can become part of the strange and wonderful mosaic of experience you carry around with you. A lovely, glowing, orangey-yellow moment when everything stopped and your heart cracked open.
And then you see a friend that you love dearly and you can't help but go and hug them, and tell them they are important, and you are grateful for them.
Amidst it all, we are really all just trying to be free from suffering.
view Daigan's profile
Wow. What a beautiful post.
It's wonderful to find calm in something as simple as a bowl full of fruit.
Thank you for sharing this.
view foodwoolf's profile
Cracked hearts opening to jams and loving and building new shapes in a life filled with wildfires, beauty and precious moments. Its mosaic glimpsed in a breath so grateful. Thank you.
view truedharma's profile