One Small Thing

for mornings when the mist is deep

When I wake, the mountains are cupping their hands, holding the mist close. I pull the blankets higher and gaze into the white. Perhaps that’s a tree limb, and that? That might be the gleam of a car on the parkway, slaloming across the ridge line. My bed is soft and warm. It’s easy, in the muzzy in-between of early morning, to allow the world to be indistinct. In these moments, I don’t struggle to see or understand.

Later, after two cups of tea, it’s more difficult to accept the mist. To realize my thoughts are still in the womb of their own becoming. After weeks of wanting the clarity of birth, the sudden blooming of light as the mist clears, I’ve surrendered to the unknowing. There’s a big decision I must make. Soon. But not today.

Today, I walk outside in my pajamas and allow my feet to feel the cool damp of the flagstone outside my bedroom door. The pump has started circulating water in the courtyard’s small pond. I listen to the splash and picture the goldfish hiding at the pool’s bottom, hovering under last autumn’s leaves. In November, the leaves lay thick on the water. We use a rake to lift them out and onto a tarp. After they dry a bit, getting a little lighter, we’ll drag them out to the woods which start mere yards from the house.

But we never can get all of them. The leaves, that is. Oak and ash, maple and poplar, mingle in the pond’s water becoming a thick silt the fish rest in through the winter.

Apparently, it’s spring now. The calendar assures me we’re heading toward summer. But I don’t feel it yet, standing in my pajamas, my feet grounding into the earth. My arms sweep upward toward the invisible sun, circle down into prayer position, then flip so my hands, still palm-to-palm, are now pointing down. I’ve asked practitioners from many spiritual traditions if they know this gesture—starting in prayer position with fingers toward the sky, then arcing their hands downward so their fingertips point toward the earth. No one has recognized this sequence, but my body does. And so I do it over and over, slowly, in time with my breath. I picture a cord running through me, connecting me to the ground beneath my soles and the heavens above.

This is the one small thing I can do as I hover in the mist, cradled by the mountains.

Later, the fog will burn off.

Later, clarity will come.

But not quite yet.