Sometimes It Snows Blossoms

I wish you could see how it snowed blossoms downtown yesterday. I was walking along State Street, and a warm gust of wind shook white petals from the trees and tossed them into the air, and they circled us in silence and slow motion, a blizzard of blossoms. I stopped in my tracks, enchanted. In bare branches nearby, a chorus of black crows watched. I don’t know why, but people kept hurrying along as if nothing amazing were happening.

It reminded me a little of this scene from Fellini’s Amarcord, the first snowfall.

But that’s the way it is sometimes. It might be the quality of light, a fragment of bird song, a fragrance, a glimmer, or just a snow flurry of blossoms…wonder and bliss wash over me—and my heart swells with gratitude. I call these I-love-my-life moments. They don’t last, of course, but while they do they are a kind of enlightenment, and they are real.

I’m struggling to figure things out, and I know that this is a First World problem. How many of us have the luxury of pondering? But I think I am making progress, although progress implies a tangible goal, and I don’t know what my goal would be.

A few nights ago I had a dream that I cannot put into words, but it affected me deeply. It had something to do with walking through a spinning vortex, strewn with stars and flecks of dust; no landmarks or parameters were visible, navigation was based on blind faith. But I moved along, exhilarated, not afraid. Sometimes I held the hands of others, helping and being helped. Sometimes I was a lone pilgrim, and sometimes not a separate form at all but simply part of the cosmos. See? I don’t have the words. The words are already shrinking my dream.

I have a lucky life. Some of it is the result of choice, some of it effort, but always there is a huge element of luck. (And that awareness should foster compassion. Fate is not an equal opportunity provider.) But sometimes I am haunted by how much this lucky life cost. I abandoned those tugging at my ankles (to use Mary Oliver’s phrase, from her poem The Journey) and the voices crying for their lives to be mended, and I’m not proud of that. I thought I had to go it alone, and I left my place of origin and eventually ended up here. When I’m being kind to myself, I recognize that it took a bit of courage and guts to set out as I did, but now I am drawing nearer to the fade-away section of life, and I very much want to be good and kind and not have missed whatever it was that mattered. In some cases, it is too late to make amends. But all we have is now.

And forgive this stream-of-consciousness post, but that brings me back to where I started. Sometimes it snows blossoms.