Compositions

Worn Thin

I had a vision of you by my side in a public garden winding in London.

You stood in front of me while I was on the phone with my ex, being pulled at by the past while leaning into the future…

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She could feel his impatience and worry to have her fully in this life with him, and she could relate because he was still tied up in ending it with his girlfriend.

She reached out while still on the phone and took his strong, warm hand, pulling him close to sit beside her.

She brought his hand up to her face, resting her cheek against it and then kissed it, marveling at its smooth texture.

Holdiing him like this for a moment, the call was finished and she turned to look up at him, her eyes smiling in wonder at the restored joy being in his presence brought to her.

His eyes softened as he watched the changes move over her: from one moment of broken down weariness to now returning, fatigued youthfulness.

He could never get enough of watching the seasons play across her, and of the vibrance burning inside that always found a way to return to him.

Stream of Thought

For A Moment

In the muted light of the curtained hotel room, I explore supplement possibilities, try one released into warm molasses tea, and decide its smell is not for me.

Nature’s Path Organic Pumpkin Seed And Flax Granola accompanies in macadamia nut milk, and I realize that for a moment nothing is pressuring immediacy.

Lemon balm tea with a lavish amount of honey claims it will soothe digestion and neurology.

I experience what it feels like to be, simply.

Photography

“How I Feel”

Athena Stairs, September 6, 2022

Stripped with one leaf left, as new leaves are valiantly growing. This is the ficus I bought 4 years ago when living a summer out of my car, searching for our new home. Funny how thematics continue, and this tyke keeps weathering the journey. A sign of hope – dangerous to cling to were it to give up on me. A reflection of my link with nature, and its endurant encouraging.

Compositions

An Article I Am Writing

There’s a tree on (nth) street that is dying.

I passed under it one day while walking between my parked car and the moving truck I was renting one hot day in July this year.

It’s lush, green leaves were beginning to curl inward and I got the sense that it was struggling more than it should be in this kind of hot weather, being as it was many years successfully established with a lovely array of limbs arching.

It seemed to me that it needed water badly, and it turned out that landscapers had recently removed the weed roots that used to cover its own roots (likely goring its top feeder roots in the process) and then moisture-sucking “bark” was spread all over the now stripped dirt’s surface.

I kept having to walk past it throughout the month while moving slowly from my apartment, and I began to water it a little about every other evening to try to give it a boost if hydration.

Sometimes, when I had finished pouring three to four gallons of water evenly in a easy ring around its roots, the wind would suddenly pick up and the tree’s branches and leaves would rustle – as if it or the wind itself were thanking me.

The day came when at last I was finished moving and I asked the shop employees at the three shops nearesr it if they could inform their employers and take over giving the tree more water that it needed to ensure its recovery.

One shop furmly refused; another shop’s employee listened, bemused and barely responsive; and the one directly in front’s desk reo humored me by coming out to see – but apparently, no one has done much of anything.

Nature seems to be an asset, only when it self redeems.

So I kept going by occasionally after hours, still trying to give it at least “sips” of water to keep going and get through summer, even though its leaves began steadily declining.

And now, tbis evening of September 3rd on the half moon when fall should soon be approaching with the promise of much needed rain, the tree’s leaves are beginning to brown in its life’s retreat as they whither in defeat.

And I ask the community: is it just so easy to let a life go, fleeting?

(It is positioned between the street and sidewalk, so I think technically it falls under public domain.)