"Small completions seem to render everything possible."

How fortunate for my life to FallTogether in the Autumn. So much these days seems to be progressively falling apart; my present great good fortune seems an outlying experience, almost a guilty pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. I'll manage my accompanying guilt somehow. I'm much more practiced at coping with guilt than I'll ever have even half a chance of becoming at coping with good fortune, so perhaps the two will balance out each other. Months of accumulating procrastinations have been resolving themselves with little effort. I cannot claim to have cleverly planned my present state. It visited me without making reservations. Nor did I finally achieve a level of self-loathing which finally pushed me onto a straighter and narrower path. I simply seem to have stumbled into this place.

One thing leads to another. One small act breaches a long-leaking dam, reinstating a flow I might have once known very well. Junk insidiously accumulated behind that barrier, silt from a hundred and more unfinished and half-heartedly engaged-in chores. One prominent shortcoming attracting tiny likes until a swamp emerged. I fixed one big bit of undone-ness and others seemed to simply start fixing themselves. A random selection seemed to produce a perfect sequence, each step finding my hand at the very moment my hand freed up from its most recent completion. A plot line insisted upon manifestation with me just following along. My writing chair broke to unleash a list of necessary adaptations which resulted in a cleaner and better lit garage, two weeks of painfully more mindful engagement, and, oh yea, a freshly repaired and renewed writing chair, which sits drying before the fireplace now while I warmly anticipate reinhabiting my accustomed space again for the very first time.

Even a small irritant might serve as catalyst for bigger results. A single burr beneath an old saddle might produce a mucked out stable. A misinterpreted fable might yield enduring truth. This world does not move in regular rhythms, but in gushes and eddies, like every stream anyone has ever seen was trying to whisper. The great truths never make headlines, though many headlines could not possibly emerge without some underlying greater truth. Even a little lie at first might ferret out redeeming reassurance. I single stone might only produce an over-used metaphor of a rockslide, but the once great mountainside still comes down. Systems scientists label the phenomenon discontinuous and struggle to represent its progression. It seems to produce progress, anyway.

Small completions seem to render everything possible. I search in vain for causation. Bringing the kitten into the place rearranged how I relate to more than the presence of that cat. I expected a cuddly friend and found instead a recovering feral suspicious of my every move. He seems to prefer performing over cuddling, gnawing at knuckles over stroking by fingers. He chases shadows out of the wee hours and naps through the middle of every day. The Muse says that he'll come around, but he might have already come about as far as he's able. He watches his reflection, perhaps wondering why that glassy counterpart never stretches out to nudge him back. Magpies arrive just before sunrise to surprise and delight while dispatching last night's leftovers. Max stalks the big screen windows, batting his bushy tail at the show unfolding before him. I feel blessed enough just watching him, a part of a much greater AllTogether finally moved back in.

©2019 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #GlancingKnow, #PureSchmaltz