I Sit Here and Listen on Father’s Day

I sit here listening on Father’s Day.

The first without my father here in the body, listening with me, pondering the miraculous beauty of life.

As I type, the breeze has just kicked up in the tree tops, sending some dry Arbutus leaves crackling down: those carrier’s of always-death-and-regeneration that make it ever-so-hard to sneak up on a Deer, lest you tread as lightly as a Cougar. My grey kitty Cinza is out without a leash for the second day, and has come to sit and listen with me before she silently lopes off. The bees buzz loudly. All is communion and communication. And so I sit listen, feel, watch, smell:

I Sit Here and Listen on Father’s Day

There are certain sensations

Like the buzzing of the bees in the Ocean Spray

Like the barely-there breeze moving across the surface of still waters

The sparks that float up from the flickering campfire towards the stars

These intermediaries

Reach between one and another

Across the so-called unknown

Sacred Communion

Of my body and the mystery

Oh to live with these sensations trembling at the edges of my vision

Whispering at the place where my skin meets the air

Where my inner ear receives the hum of pollination

Vast regenerative pulse

Oh to sit and listen to this hum

To attend to the rising and falling tide

That liminal place of overlap

At the edge of the ocean

When the breeze rustles the giant maple leaves

And hummingbird hovers right there before me

Why would I not feel your presence?

Why miss that chance to be entranced by the in-between

Of one and another

Across the so-called unknown?

Sacred communion

They say that when we die, we pass away; we are gone from here. Most certainly our body is gone, perhaps dissolving into the earth, or floating away, ash on the wind and waves. Is all of us gone, passing from the here and now, away to somewhere else?

Perhaps, when we die we pass away into that liminal place of tides and wind, returning as Spring song, bird on the wing, snap peas on the vine, the honeysuckle’s sweet scent? That quiet place of rustling leaves, that fresh breeze on sun-baked skin? The art carved in ancient stone, a poem on the wind?

As I walked out into my day, I held this listening close to my heart, slowed down enough to notice what the land was saying, what wanted picking up, what laying down.

This is what my father taught me in his last days: that these senses are not to be squandered, this time with a body, with the bees, the stones, the trees, the waves and breeze, is to be relished.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

I sit here and listen on Father’s Day.

For my Beloved Father, Michael White, who walked out of this world a week ago this Thursday.

love you dad,

your daughter, Belinda