Monday, back to work. A storm near Hong Kong is whipping the air and clouds over us changing the sky like a cartoon, so powerful it must be to reach out so far and lash us with its tail. We had one hit full on a year ago and I remember it as exciting and the whistling in the street and the brutal power, a forced re-connection with nature. The next day as you poked your head out of your door like an animal, the mess was great; look what the storm did.
Our blessed walk was cooler for the clouds and the blessed breeze this morning. Water sat on the pathway, had it rained? The trees rustle their leaves in a sigh of relief or it’s the sound of branches playing. Or praying? I try to write instinctively but I know my mind is vetoing some things and letting other stuff go down on the brown paper with the new pen. Who is deciding? 4 people walked past on the other bank all with umbrellas ready in hands and I thought it was worthy of mention but I didn’t write about them and now I have. One of them, a man in a white cap, wore a blue vest pulled up over his round tummy. An old man in a white vest and white shorts and black socks up his calves heads to wash a pot in the water from a tap, puts it back in a black bag over his shoulder, wipes hands on his bottom, then on a cloth, then disappears. Being back at work suggests shorter spells writing like at Caves Beach, so the decision to write what you see seems to have been made. It’s true.
My new pen says O.B. on the side; Office Ball, it’s a good name for a pen, not so much for a party. Or a sport.
Waiting for inspiration I ponder a small new branch on a tree near it’s base - it doesn’t make sense, unless you do some mathematics and consider it’s random possibility, maybe?
Old people wobble in circuits along avenues, arms rocking, right side leaning trees, left side steel fences, under foot concrete, overhead leaves. Wobbling with the push and pull of nature and man, turn around, do it again. Do it until you die, to put off when you’ll die, I wonder why. And the leaves in the tree say a prayer, or sigh. And there’s sun but not a sight of blue sky. And now I’ve unwound from the day and am listening to birds and insects and hammering diggers and this is the wave, let’s take it to shore, and then home.
