the living night

I lean into the window’s lips, ajar. Sharing a breath with the night air, offering the warmth of my exhales, drinking its coolness with steady inhales. Its delicate breath climbing the skin of my face, seducing me outside with its promise of crisp vitality. 

I rise from where I sat to pray - to meditate, really - the most honest prayer I know. 

And I step oscillating my weight from one side to the other, as if tossing a ball between my hands. Like this I move, swinging in rhythm, one step at a time forward. 

Joints crack as floorboards creak. The crepitating and conversing of matter in motion. 

Palms of my feet feeling themselves awake as earthbound hands. Flesh pressing upon wood, a kindred sensation. My awareness widens in astonishment, realizing the significance of having two palms to the ground and two to the skies. The skies now being the pencil held tightly in my right hand, and this notebook supported graciously by my left. 

I’ve made it to the door I left ajar, ever so slightly, as I rarely do. Wondering now if I could have foreseen, albeit subconsciously, that I would be here to tiptoe through the house once more. Nonetheless, the door squawks as I pull upon its handle, opening towards my body. I step carefully into the hallway. 

The sleeping house, empty, still. I creak my way though to the kitchen and huddle in close to the oven clock. Borrowing its faint green glow to scratch these words into the paper. 1:01 it says. The fridge breathes, snoring softly. 

At the back door now, I turn the lock, and press upon this simple portal with my hip, swinging outwards. Launching me slowing but absorbingly into the open mouth of the night. It’s breath, now the sea in which I swim. Feet still tactile as hands, press one at a time into the moist grass. Cold, soft, touching. 

Wind speaks through papery leaves and garden chimes. It whirs though bare branches. Bold too in its immense silences. 

Stars through oak branches lend their light through my gaping retinas. Shadows of varying translucence layer upon the void. 

A chill stings, the door I left also ajar swings now fully open, the house calls me back in like a mother’s warm, safe embrace. So easily taken for granted. I glide back inside, through the restful home, to my room. Greeted by the lingering aromas, the smells of my own being I’m so accustomed to I can hardly even place. 

The red glow of a dimmed light. The full glass of water. The clean sheets neatly folded open, anticipating my arrival. I sit and sip and write. 

Astonished, still frankly, at the profundity of the conversation that takes place between my body and the bodies of all the beings in this space, and the space itself too. The very aliveness, sentience of the world and its components. To see with new eyes, or rather to feel with fuller awareness, the true animateness of all things is a radical homecoming. 

I slip my clothes off and slide into the soft embrace of my bed, I sense a friendship between it and I, one of mutual affection and honesty. To lay my body upon this bed and lend my full weighted gravity to its firm softness. We press upon each other like this each night, holding and being held. A bond of intimacy. 

The wall creaks, the room itself speaks. I crack a knuckle in response. A nod to the presence all around. Animating any, all forms. And singing through them in any, all ways. Cracks or whirs or caws or silences. 

My belly balloons, pressing into the mattress as I lay writing, for a depth of breath which centers me. The magnitude of this experience, of waking up to the liveliness of the beings all around is so expansive, explosive in a way, sending my awareness spinning out to the fringes to meet all the sentience in this pulsating field. Breathing pools me, or rather my awareness, back in to the center. 

Beings. To see what we, most of us at least, have been trained to see as an “object” - whatever that means - as a being is to acknowledge that it is. “To be,” the verb implies, one is existing. It is being. Perhaps seemingly not in the way that I am apparently being, but to deny that it is, is to refute its existence. To banish it from my reciprocal dynamic relation with it. 

How jarringly one-sided, how lonely, how blind - in a way - it is to experience that I am alone in my room right now. As I would have often felt, and many people immersed in this individualistic way of thinking and feeling might. Yet now, everywhere I look there are forms, flesh of wood, rolls of cloth, space - empty, only to the eye - all full of life, of potentiality, intention and presence. All existing, being, beings. And I merely one among them. 

As I lay here and breathe, I taste ever so slightly the breath of the night air, still whispering in through the narrow yawn between the window’s lips. I blow a kiss to this sea of evening and enter it from within, as I pull the shades down on my own eyes and submerge into the expanse of the night.