'Remembering' - a poem
When was the last time you laid in the grass? Really lay in the grass, face against the earth, pressed into the forest of lawn
witness to the cloud of life that flits and buzzes always around your ankles without you knowing - watch how they move across your domestic landscape turned Jurassic.
And while you lay there the smell of sunshine paints the air pale green and you can feel where the shade rests its fingers on your back, your thighs, and where the sun warms the winter out of your marrow and there’s a swelling of sound that rises as you lay there - paying attention as you are. In layers, it comes to you, like sections of an orchestra.
First the birds. The trees are dappled with them.
They chirp and whistle and sometimes scream. Beneath them, a lawnmower hums a few fences away.
The sound of traffic along the road drifts up over the rooftops and settles next to you on the lawn.
A door somewhere slams.
Even these carry a nostalgic tranquility, the kind that wells up once in a while when you’re lying in bed and the air is just right and you feel as if you are twelve years old walking to the bus stop on an autumn morning.
That kind of nostalgia.And you really can’t pinpoint whether it’s a scent or the temperature, but all of a sudden you are yourself in another time looking forward to yourself in middle age trying with great concentration not to concentrate too much lest your thinking scare the other, more innocent you away.
So you lay as still as possible in the half-wake half-dream of the past, who still lives in you - or who you still live in - and sink your soul’s feet into the warm, still waters of remembering.
And laying in the grass on a spring day does the same sort of thing and all those familiar sounds and sensations flow over your 12-year old self trapped within your thirty-something body and with a rush as tangible as sunlight you realise that the only things worth doing are the things worth doing - which really shouldn’t need realising, but in this moment you do and it strikes you that you’ve forgotten what’s worth doing.
Like this.
This worthy sacred moment - lying here in the grass remembering who you are and what it feels like to be soaked in existence pressed against the earth.