What is it about peeling a clementine? Make a little dent with your fingernail in the vibrant, orange skin. That’s the opening spot. Pull back the skin in any direction you want. You can peel it fast. You can peel it slow. The connected pockets of juice are being uncovered. The citrus aroma does a little dance upward through the air, and the inhale of your nostrils pulls it in closer. You remove the last piece of skin. Your thumbs meet at the center and separate the ball of fruit in half. Break the two halves into smaller pieces. It’s time to make the clementine disappear. It’s up to you.
What is it about crawling into bed? A knee comes up to the mattress as you lift the covers back. You crawl into the cocoon and let the bed wrap around you. The airy linens form to your skin like a breeze… a dense breeze. Your neck curves back over the pillow. The eyes close as soon as the mind is ready to let go of everything outside of this bed and this body. Maybe it wants to stay awake behind the closed eyes a little while, the same way a baby might wiggle around in the crib before falling asleep. You can imagine anything while you drift off. It’s up to you.
What is it about cleaning a mirror? Spray thousands of droplets onto the surface. They drench and dissolve the stains. The reflection must be blurred even more than it was before becoming clear again. Take a cloth or paper towel and wipe it with snaking motions across the mirror, side to side, up and down. Wipe away the the new potion of liquified stains. They lift off the glass and cling to the cloth. The reflection in the mirror is clear now. There are no spots to distract you from looking into the pupil of your own eye. It’s up to you.
What is it about stapling papers together? Line them up, stacked one on top of the other. Stand them up and tap their bottom edge on the desk. Feel the alignment of the pages while their knife edge claps against the flat surface. You bring a sturdy handful of split metal around the top corner of the joined sheets of paper. Close the mouth of metal and let it sink its teeth into the pages. It leaves a bond behind, like a little stick figure with two arms that reach through the same hole in every piece of paper. Once the arms are all the way through, they lock around the bottom of the stacked pages. Now the pages are one unit. You can pick them up, and they stick together. If one page doesn’t belong after all, you can rip it from the corner bond or unwrap the stick figure arms, pull them out, and start over. It’s up to you.
What is it about counting money? Bring the paper bills together the same way you stacked the pages you stapled. Find the center of the stack with your thumbs like you found the center of the peeled clementine. Press the thumbs into the bills until they fan out from each other. Pull off the top bill on the end with one hand. $5. Keep holding that five dollar bill in the hand that pulled it off the stack. Reach back for the next bill at the edge of the fan in the other hand and pull it off the same way. $10. Keep pulling away each bill from stack until you’re done counting them. $11. $12. $13. $14. $15. Or maybe you have $50 bills instead of $5’s and $1’s. It’s up to you.
What is it about rain on a window? The water droplets fly from the air onto the glass. They may as well have popped up from the glass itself. If you look really closely, all the way into one drop, you can see through it like a telescope. Everything revealed through the drop is upside down. Pull your gaze back and look at all the many droplets together on the window. Watch as they lose their grip and stretch down the glass from the original spot where they landed. It makes you want to play with them with your fingers against the window. It’s up to you.
What is it about the sun rising above or lowering below the horizon? When the sun lays back below the line at sunset, it allows the dark sky to envelop that side of the Earth the same way the covers drape over you after you crawl into bed. The mixture of sunlight and dark sky creates a glow of moving colors across the atmosphere. A similar glow greets a new day when the sun stretches back above the line of the other side of the sky. The dark sky fades then and disappears more like dissolving mist as the light touches it. These cosmic handoffs in the sky happen every day. No matter how beautiful they are, somehow they’re easy to miss. It’s up to you.
With love, Jeannie
rain on a window <3
Dear Jeannie,
What is it about....that first sip of hot coffee in the morning....that clean smell of fresh linens on your freshly made bed....a fleeting memory of a joyful time shared with a loved one?
I think it is about Being aware of the joy that all of these, seemingly small, things can bring to our day an cumulatively add to the joy each of our days.
Thank you for re-minding us to open our heart-mind's eye to all of the joys that Life gives to us every day.
Well done!
Thanks again for your re-minding perspective.
Kosmic Kisses,
Duke