The first morning in my new apartment, I sat on the steps on my patio thinking this would be my new sit spot. Goodness am I excited about that patio, but it would not be a nice place to drink coffee each morning (apparently I'm a coffee drinker now). There is nothing but wood and concrete, and I heard some birds, but didn't see a single one fly overhead on the day I sat on the terrace. There are some empty pots for a garden underneath the staircase, so I figured if the landlady didn't mind I could create some greenery to watch each morning.
Then I went to throw out the trash and explored a little in the alley behind my building. To the right there was the sign of a garden plot. As I got closer I saw it was actually a ppatch! There was a bench leaning against the wall, with the perfect spot to sit and watch the ppatch as someone sips on their morning tea, er, coffee.
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| Spring sunlight in the ppatch |
It's Lent and I'm feeling lost. Since the GED changed, everything at work feels like a different moving part, moving away from the rest of the puzzle instead of coming together. I'm trying so hard to figure it out, to give the students concrete steps forward with their education, but everything I say sounds like a broken promise. "No we don't have the practice tests yet," "No you don't have enough credits," "No your old scores aren't saved anywhere." All of this is out of my control, but it's so frustrating and trying to navigate the pieces has burnt me out.
So, I'm giving up doing too much work and taking on sitting in the ppatch. I'm giving up going out and taking on cooking long, slow dinners at home. I'm giving up spending my evenings glued to the computer screen, and taking on long, slow baths, reading more books, seeing more friends, playing more games, and longer nights of sleep.
The ppatch has already given me hopeful signs of spring, I think one bush must be the Indian plum, because it was buds when I first started sitting in February, and now its blossoms are the size of my hand. They look like hands opening to the sky during meditation. The chickadees and robins make frequent appearances, talking to one another as they pass through and check me out a little. Two pigeons, darker than most, spent a flirtatious morning cooing and following each other around the adjoining balconies and gutters. This is what I love, having a moment in the secret world that is always here, that I tune out when I'm focused on my human schedule.
This morning the crows came and sat on what Ann (a smoker and coffee drinker in the ppatch I met today) says is a chestnut tree. One held a large twig, the other stared me down for a second, as if to challenge my place in the patch. I didn't back down and took a sip of coffee without batting an eye. Then the sun broke through the clouds and lit up the row patches, and the crow accepted me and took off.
The highlight was a month ago, creeping slowly and quietly into the ppatch, trying hard not to spill my tea (back when I still could get through a whole day on tea, sigh). I looked to the top of the Doug Fir that is on the other side of the fence, but hangs generously over the ppatch. Often on the bare branch sits a crow or sometimes a robin. Today there was a hawk! It had been making an alarm call that I mistook for a squirrel. After I sat on the bench it stayed a little longer, scouting the situation. It gave up, possibly thinking I'd scared away any prey. As justice, it soared away calling out again, scaring away any prey for me.
My hawk identification is horrible. It was tiny for a hawk, and almost all white on the underbelly. My initial google research suggests it was a Short-tailed Hawk by the looks, but the International Union for Conservation of Nature says that hawk is keen to stay tropical, so back to square one. Hope it shows up again and gives me a better look.
