The other night was a full moon.
I hopped on my bike, heading east on side streets I haven’t explored yet, past, along and through streets I’ve only heard about in the news – gangs, a shooting, a funeral.
I ended up looking over some kind of park at the back of a community centre. A neighbourhood of tall apartment buildings and bungalows. Tons of kids still out playing, even in the dark. Funny thing, how the most notorious neighbourhoods of the city are also raising the most children.
Sitting on a bench, listening to the kids and watching the moon, I thought of Em in France, wondered if she was looking at this very moon over there, walking her dog in the evening.
I love this about the moon, it makes me feel how small we are on a spinning planet, all looking out at the same moon.
Em tells me she was indeed out seeing that very same full moon, and sends a picture of a glorious, blooming rose.
Here the roses are maybe a month away and everyone is still licking their wounds from the long brutal winter – it’s fierce frigid temperatures and endless quantities of snow, as if somehow it’s responsible for the state of the economy, tension in marriages, the deteriorating health of aging parents, aside from the devastation to any number of tender plants in gardens.
The sudden spring is still a shock of disbelief.
Each morning I’m on the patio doing sunrise ceremony, grateful for the new day and hot coffee, delighting in the variations in the clouds, watching them move from wispy vertebrae to fingers of god, hinting at summer storms to come.
Even here in the crummy, notorious neighbourhoods, the skies reveal their splendour every day, and up amongst the clouds, geese and ducks pass, looking for places to settle in for the season, seagulls hurry by in singles – this one heading south, that one heading north, another crossing by east to west. Like business men they seem, rushing about with self-important determination.
From France Em reminds me: Each fleeting moment is real and true.
And it occurs to me that even weeds have their own kind of beauty.
Weekly Photo Challenge – Forces of Nature
follow your nose 