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Flocks of birds drew my eyes to find the clearing in the overcast February sky in-between 2 concrete city buildings. My body lured, as hope leaped up into my heart. Their movement felt ominous in the way that renewal and promise seem to live just on the other side of slowing down long enough to notice things. I had just sat down on a brown herringbone couch, low back sinking into the gentle allowance of an afternoon pillow.

Massaging the crown of my head as I looked at rows of looming windows in between the blinds. Remnants of snow lingering on the building’s ledges and I thought about how this was stark mid-winter at 3:30pm on a February Tuesday, how this would be sensory still for anyone, about how I still felt nurtured and green forest vibrant inside. About how we all were still doing it. Moving through. Without loneliness, with a subtle observation.

Alongside peppermint tea and a white paper bag holding a small coconut chocolate cookie. And it’s often in these spaces, the pause long enough to listen, that we remember all that we have done today~the yoga, the writing, the class planning, the quiet steps along snow covered sidewalks. The article I read describing how Cambodians say of sadness “the water on my heart has fallen.” The dinner I’ll cook while a white candle burns next to a dried red rose. The question billowing up from my bones: “and just why isn’t this all enough?” Seems so silly all the times we get pulled, and forget that it already is.

The older man in the suit and grey fedora with soft blue eyes who told me to have a nice afternoon, and looked at me with a kind of acceptance as if to say he recognized all parts of me and loved me just the same. Just for sitting there looking out the window at mounds of days old snow. And the man 2 stools down-he was asking his girlfriend’s mother if he could marry her daughter. I had to think that it all had to mean something good.