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past midnight now, a memory of 11/2/16
Riding in a taxi, I look out the open window. I feel the air and think of rain.
I know rain on a car window. As both the driver and the passenger. I know it so intimately. The sound and look and feel and smell (if the window is open). All these memories of rainy car days are comforting, warm memories, I think I’d go back to given the chance.
It’s part of the world that I know. In my cells. I look out that taxi cab window and wonder, would I really want any of this to change? These cars and bridges and buildings. Stone and steel. The best we could do up to this point. This world is the best we could do. We will do better, but right now is the best that we, collectively, could do. That’s a striking thought to me. With all the rage and ignorance, violence, suffering, loneliness, staring into screens imagining our lives as “better” than they are, superficiality, greed, corruption, judgement, dangerous power imbalances, sorrow, fear, threadbare hopes covered in glitter: We’re at our best right now. For just beneath this is tender, beautiful vulnerability and desires. Truth. Our hearts. Love. Even power built upon corruption and greed is a power that is loved, or one wouldn’t have worked so hard for it. Love breathes beneath all our silly little contraptions built in the best way that we could figure out. Cement, plaster, and a little paint makes a home, with something always broken. That’s just the way it goes. But effort and sweat and intelligence went into all of it. And we would miss it, at least I would, when it’s gone.
I remember I awoke at 6am one morning as a girl. I stood outside in the mist and faintly rising light and looked at the street that I knew. Every inch of that street and blade of grass on the lawn. My whole body knows that place. And I thought, one day, this will all be gone. Never to exist again for anyone to know. For the whole of Earth will be gone. I couldn’t breathe for the gratitude of it.
A raindrop on a car window is nothing to look past. It is part of what we know, which couldn’t be known without the love to put it there.
While we imagine “better,” we must acknowledge that Right Now is the best that it will ever be.
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