ON A SATURDAY NIGHT

 On a Saturday Night

Time is different the older you are.  Have you noticed?  Although there's less future, there's so much past that life feels very full.  My life span feels huge--my brain, heart, memory, thoughts all burgeoning.  Every little thing recalls something else.  Knowledge is boundless.  I have familiarity with decades.  Different fashions, periods, wars, manners, technology.  My very skin could burst with all that's inside me.  

It's the same for all of us.  We know about birth, we know about death, we know about life, we know about loss, we know about love, we know about hope.  Sometimes I think that I know everything that matters.  How to read a poem, how to root begonias, how to comfort myself, how to make Moroccan chicken and perfect grilled salmon, how to find God.  How to survive just about anything, certainly more than I ever thought I would have to.  

Who of us knows what time we have left?  But the years behind overlap with what's to come and life seems whole.  It seems complete.  It's a miraculous feeling, this fullness, this plumpness of life, as if it stretches endlessly.  

Tonight I sit indoors and hear the cicadas and tree frogs and perhaps a coyote far off.  I can predict just when the train whistle will sound.  The dog snores softly with his head propped on the roll of his bed.  I'll be in my own bed soon.  Tomorrow I'll feed him again and let him out and make tea and dress for church.  There I'll light candles for a person important to me whose mind and heart are confused.  

But tonight all that has gone before seems enough, satisfying, like a good meal.  The days we've been alive are just right; let's have no quarrel with them.  Each has built us, has given us something, has held us up and enlarged our soul.  God is at the center of this.  God has been here all along, for me first in my mother's love, my father's interest, and in our small families of four:  the one I was born into and the one I gave birth to myself.  

What a blessing this feeling is.  I am writing it down to preserve it in words, because not every day is so overflowing due to, really, nothing at all.  God is here this very moment.  

Thank you from Nina Naomi