It starts this way. The bookmark is missing. It is a tiny replica a of an antique oriental carpet. You would think that by now I would have a system, that I would put the bookmark in the same spot when I peel open the book. But instead, when I am finished reading, I am always looking for the little carpet. It is hidden within the colours of the quilt or the folds of the blanket or it has fallen to the floor. This morning, I look all over and finally find that I have actually stashed it back between the pages of You Must Revise Your Life. There it is, doing its job, marking the place where I will begin again tomorrow.
This morning, I carry my heavy mug of hot chocolate out into the courtyard. I am immensely satisfied with the dogs’ water bowl. I scrubbed it yesterday. It makes me happy to see it sitting there, gleaming in the early light, holding water in a beautiful way, reflecting all that the morning can contain.
I peer up into the sky through clumps of wet eyelashes and I am ten again, stretched out on my stomach, on the hot asphalt of a driveway, propped up on my elbows, with my friend, fresh out of the pool, shivering. Beads of chlorinated water cling to our bony arms and legs. We look up at the cumulus clouds and search for the forms within them: a dog playing the piano, a lion, a horse, an ocean wave. Then as now, the sun is playing coy, hiding behind the clouds and I am waiting patiently for it to emerge and warm my goosebumped skin.
Never then could I have envisioned how my own story would condense, and yet, all the forms it would take were there in that summer sky, like tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. I have had more than my share of dogs and horses. I have two pianos. I have been to the places where the big cats hunt. I live in a forest where the big cats live. Yet those clouds could not show me this particular landscape and sea or tell me which relationships would miraculously crystallise or which would evaporate or what I would make of any of it.
Light and shadow, a life appears through the being and doing of it all. Each life a magic carpet flying across the dark and brilliant passages of a very large book, playing hide and seek like the sun beneath the clouds. Each detail within a life appearing and disappearing like the tiny raindrops that magnify the leaves of the Japanese maples and lemon trees in this place where I am, that the clouds did not know.