Totally Normal

I've been stopping to smell almost every single lilac tree I can physically approach. White ones, purple ones, pink ones, almost-blue ones. Sometimes I smell some that aren't actually lilacs, which are then either equally good smelling or really, really stinky--life's a crapshoot! Smelling all these makes me feel strangely wealthy, like I'm rich in scents. Also, how lucky we are that pollinators like smells that humans appreciate too; otherwise, maybe every flower, not just some, would smell like corpses.

These were pictures that I took when I volunteered at the Arb yesterday (was it really yesterday? seems oddly long ago). I love volunteering there, though it has been almost too beautiful to be true the past two times. I love being out under the blue sky, hot sun, and occasional red-tailed hawk. Red-tailed hawks are huge!! They are actually like the size of a small sedan. For mice. There's a pair of red-tailed hawks who have a nest in a grove of pine trees near the Native Plant Garden, which is where I work. When I was little, that pine tree grove always reminded me of Bridge to Terabitha, that part where Leslie (is that her name? Or was that his name?) pretends she is a queen of a kingdom and the pine grove is the sacred place. 

It really is kind of awe-inspiring under there. And the pine forests up north even more so.

Anyway, the first day I volunteered I scared a nest of baby rabbits whereupon one ran away and got snatched up by the hawk. WHOOSH. I almost peed myself in excitement. Actually, I was dehydrated, but I would've if I could've. It felt perfectly right for the hawk to catch that rabbit, despite my admittedly non-natural interference (I wasn't actively trying to feed the hawk, I was pulling weeds and scared them out from ten feet away). The hawk took the rabbit up to a tree, plucked out its fur and probably some skin, then took it back to its nest to feed baby hawks. Hawklings. Stephen Hawkling har har. It was so right and oddly beautiful. Then I picked up a queen bumblebee. The takeaway message was: we miss so much of what we're looking at. I hope to look up and around and down a bit more, engaging all my senses, so I don't pick up the weird buzzing clump of grass or put my hand literally two inches from a baby rabbit and startle both of us nearly equally. So I see the muskrat in the water (I did! On my walk, which I will talk about in a moment), the oriole in the tree, the bug on my bed, the person in front of me. The beauty all around.

I went on a run this afternoon but it was so lovely later in the evening that I had to get out of the apartment. I went down for a walk along the lake, which was perfectly calm and perfectly stinky at times. Walking helped and on the way back a breeze dissipated the smell somewhat. The sky looked like:
<------THAT. That that that. Birds were doing their evening chorus (I heard a robin that sounded unbelievably pretty, I always thought robins would speak in fat, British voices). Voices from people in the park having fun floated over and several fishermen were out standing enjoying the evening. I saw one catch a bluegill! Almost went over to ask him if that's what it was but then I figured he probably wanted the peace and quiet of the evening so I would respect that. It's nice to enjoy someone else's enjoyment. I saw Grandmother Muskrat, or at least one of her many iterations, which stupidly made me overjoyed and almost feel like it was a good luck omen for the rest of my life.



Which, admittedly, has some rough bits in it. It's so hard to look forward without looking back and regretting the past. I know it's not proactive and it's too late to change anything now, but applying for medical schools makes me realize how much I didn't do right through college; that's just the plain fact of it. It's hard to face the fact that you may believe yourself to have qualities you want to show to the world and bring to the world, that make the meeting better for both, but it's nearly impossible to even get introduced. So that's one thing I've been struggling with. It's so important to keep going forward. There's also the whole what's going to happen to me and Scott when the summer's over thing, a big Thing which despite my best efforts continues to sit in my mind like an obnoxious elephant taking a dump. I think is coming out to color all of our interactions, the way I see us, and everything important. Sometimes I honestly don't know anything at all. 

But the only thing to do is keep on keeping on. Which I only just recently learned were lyrics from a Bob Dylan song. Actually, that's not right. I don't intend to keep on keeping on, because applying the same exact actions to life wouldn't change anything. I intend to keep on changing...on. Changing on? Remembering things that were once important to me (my god I was the most monumental nerd on the face of this earth providing, of course, those other earths that were terraformed by SPACE WARRIORS didn't have humans, duhhhhhhh), like reading lots of books including story books. Or hardcore doodling. Or...whatever. Remembering those as well as finding new things and refining, focusing in, on other old things like why exactly I want to go into medicine and working my ass off for it. To end with neither a bang, nor a whimper, but a cliche (so maybe a whimper)--life is just too fucking short. 

Amen.