Permutations and Permeability

A hummingbird has come to visit the scarlet geranium in the yellow pot on the corner ledge of the faded porch.  It is late morning and late summer; she hovers for a moment on invisible wings, drawn to the small, brilliant blossom trembling on a slender stalk.  The plant has outgrown its container – its caretaker has been busy about many important and inconsequential things – and the nearby trees, planted decades ago by other hands, have grown in full and green and shade the ledge where the geranium balances precariously and blooms humbly. The hummingbird darts away, the flower incandescent but lacking sweetness. 

It was an insignificant moment – barely a breath in one speck of the timeline– yet also unique in all the universe.  This encounter, and my witness of it, was the gift of an infinitude of permutations, the greatest part of which I cannot name.  I wander in the mystery of it, dizzy among the variables – the awesome possibilities for the existence of the geranium, the hummingbird, the day, and me.   

It is August and the light has begun to fade at both ends of the day. The barely perceptible encroachment of darkness draws me towards introspection.  Perhaps that is why I am mulling the chance encounters of hummingbirds and geraniums and the slow drift of clouds.   The kids have headed back to school – another sign of the changing seasons – bearing a reminder that we all have so very much left to learn.  I snap a photo as they rush out the door, timestamp a moment, and tuck it away with so many ephemeral childhood passages.

It may be that my membranes are more permeable this time of year, more open to what comes.  I am grateful for these late summer days, knowing as I do that they are fading and fleeting.  I wonder at my children, balanced on the cusp of childhood and something else; they grow and change each night, leave something behind, emerge as entirely new beings in the morning. We celebrate our family anniversary each August on the date that bound us together in a land far away.  While I marvel at the possibilities that brought me a fleeting moment with a hummingbird and geranium, I am simply overwhelmed with the miraculous permutations that created a family. 

In a recent wave of this late summer nostalgia, I was drawn into a labyrinth of memory in a box of old letters.  I found a few particular pages that I had hoped existed beyond my own faded recollection of them. I was twenty and far from home, studying abroad in a place where I was excited and awake and completely overwhelmed.  A friend had just returned from his own adventures as I was leaving, and was struggling to settle back into a more routine life as mine was being upended.  “Let everything please you and it will,” he wrote. “DO EVERYTHING SEE TRAVEL EAT THEIR BREAD DRINK THEIR WINE LISTEN TO THEIR STORIES DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANYTHING!!!”  His words are scrawled on scraps of paper, as wise to me as a Greek philosopher, spattered with the lentils he was cooking and dropped and wrote about in the next run-on sentence.  We both had been driven students and later, respectable career people.  His letter was a reminder of a moment in time, of learning to be a little less tightly wound and simply alive in the day.  Thirty years later, it is still a challenge to remember my own capacity to order some variables and just be open to the rest; to perhaps rest at the crossroads of permutations and permeability.  Practically, I suppose, the task is to find wisdom in the ordinary and spout joy in capital letters, all while cooking the lentils and not making too much of a mess.